Year 2, Week 49

A96, Fornighty road closure, beach issues, community briefings ...

Amey and the A96

Local members had a meeting with Amey this week to discuss issues relating to the A96 through the ward. Among the things discussed was improving the phasing of the traffic lights through Nairn and Amey are putting a proposal to Transport Scotland to improve these.

We also talked about improvements to the eastern Auldearn junction where is a need for both a deceleration lane when approaching from the east to turn left and a central refuge when approaching from Nairn to turn right. Apparently this has been long asked for by previous councillors but to no avail. We are arranging a meeting with Transport Scotland to discuss. At that meeting we are also going to be asking about progress on reducing the 40mph sections at both the west and east entrances to Nairn to 30mph which I know a lot of people would like to see happen.

C1157 at Fornighty closed

This road will be closed for works by Openreach on Thursday, 25th April along the section marked in blue in the map below.

There will be a local diversion in place although it’s via the ford through Muckle Burn so you might want to choose another route if the burn is in spate that day.

Site meetings

This week in my role as a member of the South Planning Applications Committee I had an eight hour round trip to Arisaig in a minibus with an agricultural suspension (it was so bumpy my Garmin watch thought I did 14,000 steps and awarded me a prize!) to do a site inspection for an application coming to the committee at the end of the month. The joys of being a councillor.

On Monday I am joining members of Nairn West and Suburban Community Council for a walk along central beach to look at the coastal erosion issues there.

Disabled beach access

You may remember that back in November we met council officers on site to discuss the new beach access onto Central Beach which a lot of people were not happy about from the start and which had not coped at all well with stormy weather. The good news is that we are now getting a complete refund of the money paid to the contractor (and don’t get me started on why they were paid in the first place!) and so we will soon be able to revisit this project and try to get a proper job done this time.

Community Briefings

The council puts out a fortnightly community briefing via email with lots of useful information in for community organisations and indeed that’s from where my post last week about the Business Digital Grant came.

Any group or organisation can sign up for it and there’s a lot of information and links in each edition. If you want to subscribe there’s a form here.

Voter ID

We have a General Election coming up some time this year and, unlike with local or Scottish Parliament elections you will need to show photo ID when you go to vote. This video explains your options. Make sure you’re prepared, especially if you don’t have the obvious driving licence readily to hand.

Planning applications

No new applications have been logged since I last posted.