Trustees of beleaguered north-east tourist attraction Archaeolink are making a last-ditch effort to secure outside funding to reopen the park for business.
The doors of the prehistory park at Oyne are expected to remain closed after Aberdeenshire Council withdrew its funding.
Staff were told last week they would lose their jobs on March 31, the day before it was due to open for the summer season. Mid-Formartine councillor John Loveday, who sits on the board of trustees alongside council leader Anne Robertson, said there was some hope the park could continue to operate.
He said: “We would like to see someone come forward with some financing to keep it going. We are pursuing one or two lines of inquiry. It is fair to say it would be a last-ditch attempt, but now that it has come to everybody’s attention, we can only hope that somebody can help take the thing further forward.”
Mr Loveday said there was no definite timescale for finding a backer, but conceded there would be a point at which the board was forced to “pull the plug”.
According to the local authority’s 2009-10 accounts, the centre posted net losses of £132,000 for the year ending March 31, 2010, while its assets were valued at more than £1.7million.
For the past five years, Aberdeenshire Council has subsidised the park at a rate of £135,000 a year while visitor numbers have been steadily declining to just over 10,500 for 2009-10.
That equates to a council subsidy of more than £13 per visitor.
The park was opened amid great fanfare in June 1997 by television personality Tony Robinson.
However, it was branded a “white elephant” by residents from the beginning, and failed to attract the numbers of visitors anticipated.
The current trustees took over the running of the site in 2005 after a “critical” internal audit on its financial management.
Audit Scotland warned the local authority would have to repay a £2million grant received from the European Regional Development Fund if the trust was disbanded before June 2007.
Mr Loveday told the Press and Journal at the time that the council “couldn’t afford to close it down”. The watchdog later noted in its annual report for 2006-07 that “the deadline for the repayment has now passed and the trust continues to operate with a reduced contribution from the council”.
Mr Loveday confirmed yesterday that the council still owned the land at Oyne, although everything on it belongs to the trust.
If no investor is found, it is expected that council officials will draw up a report detailing options on what might be done with the land.