Does work of dedicated volunteers mean so little?

So the St Modwen plan relies completely on our being forced to accept another 300-plus flats on the seafront areas (after all, we don't have enough flats) and the privatisation of the last major publicly-owned space in our town.

What do we have to accept also? That the work of dozens of local people to keep a live theatre going in this town will just be ushered out the door, unceremoniously, and a company with no local connection or tradition will come in to run a '˜centre' whose size and scope we do not know?

It will have multi-screen cinema and live entertainment will '˜share' the space.

This operating company provides commercial entertainment elsewhere. I bet they will not struggle, by every means known, to survive simply because they believe Bognor needs live entertainment.

That is what Arun Arts has done.

In 1996, Arun insisted Whitbread gave Arun Arts a 50-year lease. Is Mr Jonas telling me we should regard any decision previously made by Arun in this regard as not worth honouring? When I arrived in 1979, I didn't have to wait for a multi-national to waltz in and tell us what Bognor needs, and the price we have to pay. It is those local people who have made our theatre work, not Arun (oh, not them), nor St Modwen nor Whitbread. For them, the theatre/centre has been an obstacle, an embarrassment.

So much so they can't answer what I have challenged them to answer on numerous occasions in these columns. Why, Arun, do you pay a large annual subsidy plus rate relief to the Windmill in Littlehampton, which is more cinema than live entertainment, and yet here we get rate relief for our theatre (and only because that is the law)?

Tell me, Mr Jonas, what is it you think Arun will have to do to repossess the Regis Centre site so it can be handed over to St Modwen? Compulsory purchase? Happy with that?

Happy with local people being told: Tough '“ you kept it warm, now bog off. Is that acceptable, to use the law to force through a breach of a 50-year agreement?

Arun sets itself as community leader. In truth, it didn't bother about Bognor until the town being run down became so embarrassing they had to come up with something.

In any case, we've had the flats, 700 of them, so we need the facilities.

Look at Shrewsbury '“ half our district population, yet it got 18m together to build a classy 650-seat theatre and a 250-seat studio theatre, plus all the rest.

I have ideas '“ and so do many others '“ of things that would work and which would attract people to what they would see as a unique destination.

We have no chance of being heeded. Consultation here is by numbers, and Arun wanted a quick fix.

Forgive me, Mr Jonas, if I made sure we seized back the theatre lease as a form of community insurance. So far, I have to say the offered '˜pay out' ain't worth giving it up.

You stick with '˜Saint' Modwen. I'll wait and see. I think that would be the BRight idea.

Jan Cosgrove, chairman of Arun Arts 2005-07, Longford Road, Bognor Regis