Daniel Hale
She fid, he fid, I fidn't
dealing with parks or delwp will pretty much get you nowhere, every club has their hands tied; only way to get something done is do deals with state political members, who go over parks head and get big funding; parks don't want something which will create more work for them, warburton trails stalled, creswick going nowehre [they got a jump track in town, nothing else]- pre approval for works from PV isnt going to happen. This is such a tough one to convey properly and remain diplomatic - in essence we (the MTB community everywhere) are locking horns with PV. What we're attempting to do is remove some arguments and dangle some carrots in front of them. There's no way to promise success in this but we'd be in a much stronger position with an income stream. Regardless of how much success we have, the community will be better served by a shop that's profits go to this cause. We can't promise X amount of trails, but we can promise we'll fight for them.
if you get funding, and manage to get something built parks can deal with it later; i think its still the case geeelog club can't do propertrail work, parks use their own guys, geelong can assist with small jobs - they seem more interested in making it a cultural / heritage centre, - i presume ldtr are limited in what they can do also; get small jobs approved -but nothing major
i can't see a shop [whether it makes money or not] having any influence on what decisions parks-vic makes ,negative i know -and i understand how frustrating if must be for lysty committee/users --but this isn't tasmania