Colin Payne, of Stoke Fleming, Dartmouth, writes: I refer your lead article and the letter from Paul Reach about 'putting the record straight', Chronicle, January 30. Ever since I became aware of the Business Improvement District, and along with others who had also received surprise invoices from a private ­company asking us to pay up, I have suspected that all was not right with the way this BID has been administered. When we ­questioned the BID team and South Hams Council as to why they increased the two lower-band dues by £50, after ­advertising it differently in their business plan prior to the ballot, they both agreed on the same narrative: that they only became aware of the ­mistake after the ballot. We found this hard to believe. We suspected that the BID budget was driven from the top down; a certain sum was required to execute the plan and they were massaging the levy payments from small ­businesses to fit. Without going into too much detail, our campaign group – http://www.dartmouthbidvoteconcern.co.uk">www.dartmouthbidvoteconcern.co.uk – recalculated the levy table to expose that a total annual revenue of £168,400 would be achievable from the levy payments after adjusting for the £50 increase. We ­recalculated using the council's own rateable value list for the BID area. The original pre-ballot levy table showed £143,700 per annum income, which was supposed to match with £172,350 per annum required for the budget. Clearly a mismatch, and someone had made an arithmetic error. We also looked at the detail: 50 per cent of the revenue is to be paid by smaller businesses with rateable values below £10,000, and of this 14.5 per cent of the revenue was ­expected from the marginally profitable Norton Park holiday let chalets like my own. The levy on one of my chalets is 11.5 per cent of the rateable value, while the largest business premises in town pays only 1.1 per cent of rateable value. At the extreme, one ­fisherman with a small store is being asked to pay 29.4 per cent of his low rateable value. During the BID promotion ­campaign I understand that businesses were told they would only be paying around 1.5 per cent of rateable value and the aggregate payment for multiple, separately rated units was not made clear. I would remind Dartmouth businesses that Statutory Instrument 2004 No 2443, clauses 17 (1) & (2), requires an alteration ballot because of the substantial £50 increase. This was not done. The advice of Mosaic Partnership was that it was not necessary because it resulted from a simple typing error in the business plan, and failure of delivering the annual £206,350 budget would make Dartmouth BID Ltd liable. This adds to the comedy of errors on the part of the BID. Francesca Johnson once admitted at a meeting that the BID team had to rely on the guidance of Mosaic. I do not want to get embroiled in whether Joe Murtagh's memory or Paul Reach's story are true, but I know who I believe.