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Heated open meeting fails to find consensus on park future

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Pride rejects Wilde Ones proposal

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

Over 100 people attended the Pride open meeting last night to discuss plans for the future of the event.

Pride first ran through the response to their online questionnaire and then opened the floor for questions. Consensus had not, they said, been reached on the subject of scaling down the park event. When asked about the Wilde Ones proposal, Yvonne Barker, the Chair of Pride, stated that they did not want to put the whole event into the hands of one commercial company and that Wilde Ones had not taken part in the 'transparent tendering process'. Pride said that they were currently looking at a number of other proposals.

Speaking for Pride on BBC Sussex this morning, Pride in Brighton & Hove trustee Geoffrey Bowden was asked about the Wilde Ones proposal, Bowden responded "They have put forward a very compelling case" but repeated that Wilde Ones had chosen not to enter into the tendering process - leaving it ambiguous as to whether the Pride committee will still consider the proposal when they meet again later this week.

In last night's meeting, Dean Parker from Wilde Ones said the reason he had withdrawn from the tendering process was that the goalposts were still moving and time was rapidly running out. The day before the tender date he discovered through the media that the event was likely to be reshaped and may not even take place at all. Wilde Ones, the company who has staged the event for Pride for the last ten years, has now put forward its own proposal to stage the event "as is" at no financial risk to the charity, with additional fencing and security to encourage a higher level of donations and to exclude illegal merchandise and alcohol sellers.

When asked on BBC Sussex about the downsizing of the event Bowden said that they had to respond to complaints that Pride had become "an alcohol-fuelled drug fest", and that a balance needed to be struck. He promised that a decision on the event's future would be reached "certainly before the end of the year."