Council is under fire
Council bosses have been accused of shrugging off responsibility for Stafford's floundering multi-million pound Riverside overhaul and leaving the borough with "the worst of all possible worlds".
As exclusively revealed by the Express & Star on Tuesday, the £100 million redevelopment of the site is now officially on hold.
The company behind the plans, Trent City Securities, has blamed the economic downturn for the move and said it will be years before the plans for a new retail and leisure complex on each side of the River Sow will come to fruition.
Stafford Borough Council was the driving force behind the scheme but its leader Judith Dalgarno appeared to suggest the issue was now out of the authority's hands earlier in the week.
She told the Express & Star that everything had been "hunky dory" when the Riverside deal was agreed and the scheme was only held up because of the recession. She said: "I feel sorry for Trent City Securities. It is a good scheme but they are in dreadful trouble."
But opposition councillor Ralph Cooke said the scheme was destined for failure all along.
He said: "It really is not good enough to shrug it off and say well, it was all 'hunky dory' when we started it. Now we're left with a derelict building in Tesco's, which will be ridiculously hard to fill in the middle of a recession, and across the river a wasteland, a pile of rubble in the centre of town." He added that the town had lost its leisure centre for one that is too small. "It's the worst of all possible worlds," he said
