COUN Galloway's cheap comment "we could end up with more performance venues than there are actors" (October 12), coming a day after your report on the York Tourism Bureau, speaks volumes about this man and his gang of buffoons who run this city.

While welcoming the City of Festivals, this council has lost its major performance venue - the Barbican Centre, the Impressions Gallery and the Comedy Festival.

When tourists come to York they find an increasingly expensive city with little to do in the evening save drink - and Coun Galloway doesn't even like that.

The lighting scheme, Hungate and the St Mary's Precinct projects are all very well, but are all overdue. This council has no sense of urgency. If it does not encourage more performance venues, gallery spaces and live events it will lose out, not only to West Yorkshire but to smaller towns which increasingly offer a more interesting calendar of events.

Shut up about one-off events such as Ascot and concentrate on improving what is here.

Councillor Mark Hill came out with something imaginative in his suggestion for the crumbling White Swan hotel in Piccadilly. To be dismissed in the fashion mentioned above by the leader of York council tells us a lot about the man's commitment to the city.

I find it laughable that he argues the White Swan cannot be considered because it is not in the "brief" for the redevelopment of Piccadilly when his planners have redrawn the boundaries of the brief to include green spaces such as the Eye of York.

The one thing missing from Galloway and the rest of them is a commitment to putting life back into the city. But then they are just career politicians afraid of imagination and ingenuity.

Paul Furness,

Lower Darnborough Street,

York.

Updated: 10:16 Saturday, October 15, 2005