warrior wrote:scaffidi can't drive wrote:There is a simple solution to this, sell or use the assets the club has.... There is a mountain of unused land that the club owns > with nothing on it.
either sell it or lease it or use it in some form....
it's a waste of time and space at the moment and not generating income by sitting there.
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SA Harness Racing doesn't even need to sell > it can build it's own premises and use it as an income generating exercise - but that's too smart for the members...
SCD, Didn't they recently (the members) have a vote about the proposal of a new complex? I was led to believe they wanted to move the function rooms and pokie room closer to Port Wakefield Rd as to generate more turnover and relocate a new track basically where the current back track is but they voted against it bcoz they would lose there training track.If thats the case then its these old farts who have used the facilities for years for next to nothing who are killing the industry stopping the club to progress. How many other trainers have had to buy propertys of their own and build there own tracks to keep training.
Problem is fellas that the recent proposal put forward to members was along the lines of "trust me, i'm from the government".
There is no doubt that the land at GDP is a huge asset and hopefully with Kevin Seymour working with the club they will rezone the land to commercial and lease it out to large companies for significant periods of time. Thereby giving them an ongoing income and maintaining control over the tenants. It appears that BP/McDonalds are falling over themselves to lease the vacant land a block 1km further up Pt Wakefield Rd where it would (a) return absolutely nothing to the trotting industry and (b) create a danger for those people with horses that live a bit further up the road yet the club seems to be leaving it to a small band of residents to fight this rather than getting involved. IMHO the club should be fighting hard to get this type of development on their land and helping the residents to keep it from going in where it's proposed.
Plus, SAHRA needs to start getting behind the industry in the management of these assets. Letting the Gawler club be totally dudded by the northern expressway looks totally irresponsible to me. They should have been standing right behind them saying "Gawler is an integral part of the SA industry and $3.8m is nowhere near enough to rebuild a harness racing facility, they need about 3 times that to do it properly" (Note, Menangle where there was already land has cost around $7m so far with further work to go and quotes for relocating Mildura were up to $12m), instead they were apparently right behind them saying "no, we're not giving them any race dates so they don't need a new track anyway"... point is that the future of Gawler could have been better debated AFTER the industry had been adequately compensated....