Email: Confused over breach statement

May I draw attention to the statement made by  CART regarding the appeal for donations to pay for the Trent & Mersey Canal breach?

I find this statement confusing. On 29th September, narrowboatworld quoted CART as saying this:

'While we hold a contingency fund that can be used to deal with this kind of emergency situation, this is money we urgently need to spend on essential maintenance and repairs right across the network'.

Have a close look at that sentence.

Assuming CART has the correct syntax, then surely its 'contingency fund' which, according to my Oxford English Dictionary, is 'a fund to cover incidental or unforeseen expenses', should already be set aside for this very purpose, ie. repairing a breach?

But, CART only says that the fund 'can be used'. (My italics.) Sorry, but why shouldn't its contingency fund be used for this very purpose, if it has other funding already in place to pay for 'essential maintenance'?

What is CART actually saying here?

Surely, it either already possesses the necessary funding for 'essential maintenance', plus a contingency fund (what other reason would there be for calling it thus) for this sort of emergency, or it doesn't. Which is it?

So far as the appeal for donations is concerned, if this really is money that is to be specifically for the breach repair, then I think it would be much better if, rather than just disappear into CART's coffers, donations were placed in an escrow account, to be released against actual breach works taking place.

Only in this way can a true sense of the value of donations be seen, rather in the manner of the 'graph' of the church roof repairs. How else is one to judge the actual worth of one's donation? I realise some will say that it doesn't matter where the money ends up, and if people wish to donate, that is obviously their prerogative, but I am personally against doing so for this reason. The CART statement that I mention above is far too vague about this for my liking.

In the other part of the CART statement, a manager, David Baldacchino, is noted as saying that the supposed £1.5 million cost of this breach would otherwise pay 'for three years worth of the the money that we expect to spend painting bridges'.

Is this correct? Does it really cost CART half a million every year to paint bridges?

John Wilkinson