Linton groups secure for three years as hub management deal extended

GROUPS based at the Linton Community Hub are celebrating news that their use of the building is secure for at least another three years.

The Linton Community Hub Management Committee learnt recently that the Golden Plains Shire had extended its licence agreement to operate the facility, putting to rest fears that it would be lost as a place to meet.

The former Shire site was leased to various groups after years of use as a municipal building, and representatives from several Linton organisations stepped in to formally operate the facility when those arrangements ended.

But it was initially on a year-by-year basis, leaving user groups with little certainty about the future and about what the Shire’s plans for the building actually were.

Now, with at least three years of certainty locked in, locals are celebrating.

“We were very excited about that,” management committee secretary Janet Pathe said.

“The community thought it was going to lose the building.”

Ms Pathe said the Sussex Street building, which had operated as a Shire customer service centre, had been closed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“When council closed it there were wild rumours swirling around as to what was going to happen to it,” she said.

But Ms Pathe said small community groups – among them the Linton Craft Group, Goldbrush Painters, a coffee, cake and chat group, a play reading group, an intergenerational playgroup, and the Linton Emergency Relief Pantry – had since settled there.

“It’s fantastic; we can plan things now – we can do a bit of long-term planning,” she said of the licence extension.

“The groups are growing, and it’s a good place for new people to start getting to know other people in the town.

“There’s a lot of people in Linton who live on their own, who don’t drive, and I found with the craft group that it’s a good way to get people out of their homes and around other people.

“It’s very well used by the community now, but it was a bit hard to do any forward planning – were we going to be turfed out after 12 months – and there’s not really anywhere else in Linton.

“The size of the rooms in the current facility are just right for the groups that use them.”

Ms Pathe said she believed the hub was the only one of its kind in the municipality that is used seven days a week.

“And we do hire it out to other people upon request,” she said.