Madam,

For eight years at least, the small boat owners of the Ceredigion coast have paid annual mooring fee rises well above the rate of inflation.

My own fees, which are typical, have increased by 70 per cent since the 2010 season. We have also been hit with arbitrary administration fees for “processing paper work”. We naively thought we were playing our part in the face of the county’s austerity pressures.

On the Aberystwyth harbour pontoon, there’s no water, no electricity, no toilet and no safety ladders. In eight years there have been no easily identified expenditure directly benefitting ourselves or the town pontoon, or in the gap, where most of our boats are situated. There has been the occasional dredging, but this is done mainly to meet the needs of the private marina, which without dredging could not easily operate.

We have been prepared to accept this, as we confidently expected the council to live up to its agreement with us, as existing boat owners in the old harbour, before the marina was constructed. This agreement recognised we could not afford private marina prices. The agreement was an attempt to preserve “affordable boating” for existing local small boat owners in Aberystwyth Harbour.

True to form with this council, there was no prior discussion or consultation; true to form, it was presented in such a way as to imply that it would be repeated over the following three years.

This decision gets worse, for within each Ceredigion harbour there is to be huge discrimination - commercial fishermen are to be charged a five per cent increase. Here in Aberystwyth harbour, the university sailing club and the rowing club, may not be in line for a clobbering either.

Amazingly, the council as the harbour authority is saying nothing about the harbour lease rent it expects to get from the private marina company next year. Last year this multi-million pound business venture apparently paid a mere £7,500 to council coffers via its harbour lease payments. Truly a ‘peppercorn-rent’.

The financial figures, presented behind a stated £200,000-plus loss relating to the three harbours operated by the council, when inspected make no sense at all, and could not be defended in a recent scrutiny committee meeting.

There is little doubt, these proposals have united the small local boat owners right along the coast. These are the very boaters who operate the white sailed boats, so beloved of the holiday visitors to Ceredigion.

Personally, I have always been willing to pay a fair and appropriate share of ‘actual true’ costs. What is needed now and quickly from the county council is clarity, openness, a willingness to explain and an end to such overt discrimination between harbour user groups.

If the council continues with its current approach, then many of our boats will simply disappear from the bay, and we will have been forced out of our chosen and much-loved sport and hobby.

Yours etc,

Hugh N Williams, Glan Rheidol, Aberystwyth.

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