ALTON Community Association will go cap in hand to East Hampshire District Council (EHDC) tonight to beseech councillors not to vote for a funding strategy that could sound the death knell for community centres.

EHDC is preparing to vote through another freeze on its portion of the council tax bill, backed by claims that it will not result in cuts to frontline services.

But Alton Community Association chairman Pat Lerew is adamant that to cut funding for community centres will do just that.

She will argue that such centres provide essential services and that to cut funding will sever a vital lifeline from which they may not recover.

If rubber-stamped by full council, the proposal, set by Cabinet, will serve to reinforce the perceived culture of “broken promises” and the cynical fear that community centres are being starved of cash as a way of shutting them down.

While the current three-year funding round was due to terminate this year, the decision by EHDC (Alton Herald, February 8) to withdraw £6,000 of partnership funding, with just two months notice, still came as a “tremendous blow” to Alton Community Association, which claims to have been asking since October for clarification of what they could expect next – although it was not expected to be nothing.

The news was compounded by EHDC’s declaration “to review its grant funding policy to establish how best to harness council and other funding streams to support the most vulnerable communities”.

Mrs Lerew will point out that not only does Alton Community Centre administer services to many of the most vulnerable in the community, citing the playgroup, elderly daycare and Shopmobility, which are all subsidised by local authority funding, but that the review should have been undertaken prior to scrapping funding.

While still benefiting from an £8,000 grant from Alton Town Council, Alton Community Association has also lost its grant from Hampshire County Council, which will result in the closure from March 31 of the youth club.

Alton Community Association is not unfamiliar with tightening its belt. Since 2010, EHDC funding alone has fallen from £14,000 to £9,000 in 2013 and £6,000 in 2015, and now zero, causing Mrs Lerew to ask how the association can be expected to deliver services to the community “when EHDC does nothing but look to cutting our grants”.

Dismayed to learn of proposals by EHDC to freeze council tax for 2018/19, Mrs Lerew flagged up the struggle some centres in the district are experiencing in trying to keep their doors open, citing Bordon and Whitehill where the community association is planning to surrender its lease on March 31, which could result in closure with the loss of 11 jobs.

While Alton trustees, she said, were not ready to throw in the towel, “this funding cut will make a difficult financial year worse”.

Alton’s main problem is the increasing cost of maintaining its ageing building, owned by EHDC, but which for many years has taken “every penny of surplus income”.

Mrs Lerew added: “We have now reached the point where we do not have enough surplus coming in to keep up with the work needed. We have been fortunate in receiving grants to make the building more comfortable to visit and work in by improving the kitchens and toilets. We have put in a new boiler and radiators to heat the building more effectively. We have revamped the area behind the bar servery to make it more hygienic, removing rats’ nests on the way.

“We have put in soundproofing between the ground-floor rooms so that different bookings do not interfere with each other and replaced worn-out flooring and decorated much of the ground floor to make the centre a nicer place to be. Although we secured grants to cover much of this, without the hard work of some of the trustees and the forbearance of staff this would not have come to fruition.

“However, we have now reached the point when we have had to report to our landlords, EHDC, that we can no longer maintain the building to current regulatory standards without an immediate injection of cash. We know there are ideas about new community centres once again doing the rounds, but even with an immediate decision this would be up to five years away.”

Alton Community Association has been flirting with promises of a new community centre for more than 20 years, with hopes raised and smashed as successive plans came to nothing. In 2010, when the last plan fizzled out, EHDC budgeted £150,000 to bring the existing building up to standard but, after the urgent and short-term work had been done, with only £110,000 spent, the plug was pulled and the rest of the work never completed.

“Most of this work is now urgent and we can’t tackle it from our own resources,” said Mrs Lerew.

She added: “Unfortunately, the £6,000 which we have lost this year has thrown our real crisis into sharp relief. We need EHDC to not only reinstate this amount but also to remember their promise from 2010 to help keep Alton’s Community Centre, which is a core provision for the town, up to standard.”