Stormy waters for riverside sculpture

REGARDING your article on the sluice sculpture in Ely, I must take the council to task for saying that none of the bill has been met by taxpayers. The main funding body, the Arts Council, is a quango which is funded partly from the Lottery and partly from

REGARDING your article on the sluice sculpture in Ely, I must take the council to task for saying that none of the bill has been met by taxpayers. The main funding body, the Arts Council, is a quango which is funded partly from the Lottery and partly from Government funds - that is, the taxpayer. And "money provided by developers" does, of course, also come from the taxpayer, in the form of higher prices for the developers' end product. So, the taxpayer is actually paying for this sculpture.

What does the Town Centres team at ECDC do? Is its purpose to provide us with useless art of no practical value? With Council Tax and national taxes increasing at an horrendous rate, would it not be better to get rid of the sluice sculpture and the Town Centres team as well?

On the other hand, maybe we need to keep the team to maintain the sculpture (at taxpayers' expense) when its electronics and destroyed by a few mugfuls of beer in the works.

MIKE ROSE

Broad Piece

Soham