WELL done and well done again Echo staff highlighting ‘12 council blunders from past and present’ (at bournemouthecho.co.uk).

It is truly shocking. The Echo list includes the Imax and the Reef at Boscombe, two of the most expensive disasters, but so many more can be listed costing a fortune in wasted council resources.

For instance Poole Town Football Club was to come to Branksome Rec five years ago. A huge amount of public time over a year was taken up in large meetings only for the whole project in the end to be thrown out in planning.

So the question stands, as with the travellers’ site issue in Poole right now, why is it that officers and councillors get these strategic decisions so disastrously wrong?

Cllr Elaine Atkinson refers to the current matter of Marshes End transit site being turned down by planning as a matter of “democracy in action”.

That is fair comment but, the question stands, why was this site taken forward in the first place?

What for instance was unclear about Marshes End being contaminated, being near dangerous main roads, and in all aspects highly unlikely to be a safe site for any human being to live on for any period?

And in the meantime all that we could have and don’t have in our towns: a main central swimming pool and ice-rink in Bournemouth, decent modern libraries and education centres, and school meals for all children.

These are all things we might well be able to afford if our councils were far more careful putting forward projects only when agreed to be viable and credible – not time and again planning disasters in waiting – at enormous cost to all of us in our boroughs.

JEFF WILLIAMS, Jubilee Road, Parkstone