On THURSDAY, May 30, the Central Area Committee of West Wiltshire District Council split 6-6 on a resolution to demolish Trowbridge Police Station in Polebarn Road.

The casting vote of the chairman sealed its fate.

What is generally agreed to be an attractive 1920s building, in a conservation area, will soon disappear.

Now the votes have been cast, I can make my position crystal clear.

To go public before would have been to risk censure by and sanction from the newly formed Standards Committee.

I have always believed it was possible to keep this charming building and at the same time ensure Trowbridge received a modern police facility in keeping with the twenty-first century.

Regretfully the Police Authority could not see the logic of this case.

They said that unless the present building was demolished, Trowbridge could not have modern police facilities and that by implication a full and effective policing service could not be delivered to the town.

Put simply, this was a threat. Regretfully many, including the local business community, succumbed to this threat, being unable to comprehend the wider picture.

This lack of vision is probably to be expected from police bureaucrats, but it is disturbing that local business people are so myopic, especially when that wider vision involves commercial opportunity.

The way forward was clear. Planning permission could have been obtained for residential development on the Polebarn Road site. A development that kept the attractive frontage buildings, but demolished all the nondescript accommodation elsewhere on the site, would have produced both a prestigious architectural design and an advantageous commercial proposition.

Once planning permission was obtained, the Police Authority could have a land swap arrangement with owners of another site in or around the town.

There are at least six sites that I can think of, and it is likely that a healthy profit would have accrued. Council taxpayers' money would have been saved. To say that there are no other suitable sites for a new police station is simply not true.

We now have the worse of two worlds.

An attractive building in a conservation area will be lost forever and because the new police station is to be built on this conservation site an expensive specification is required, incidentally resulting in a design that many have damned as hideous.

Already £90,000 has been spent on fees, consultants, etc and not a brick has been laid. I dread to think what the final figure will be. Remember this is all public taxpayers' money.

The votes may have been cast, but as far as I am concerned the story is by no means over.

The whole affair demonstrates a lamentable lack of strategic thinking and planning and I have here only referred to one part of the sorry saga.

In my role as a public representative, and as a taxpayer, I will be querying this all the way to the top.

Jeff Osborn,

District and County Councillor.