Week 38

Area Committee, council rents, roads, funding for projects, the Common Good, rubbish, speeding in Auldearn, and another teachers' strike ...

This has been a busy week so there’s lots to talk about so my apologies in advance that this is a long one.

Area Committee

Nairnshire Area Committee met on Monday morning. This is where the four ward councillors get together four times a year to discuss and formally agree various items. We’ve gone back to holding these meetings on Teams as it gives a better recording, which you can find here, and it also reduces the amount of driving officers have to do, which is good for the environment.

Council garage rents

Highland council rents garages and “garage sites”, i.e. land where the tenant can then erect a garage, to anyone who wants one. Historically I think this was largely tied to council house tenancies, back in the days when not everyone had a car but these days most are being used for storage.

In Nairn the council owns 34 garages and 63 garage sites and most are rented to people who aren’t council tenants. You can read more about this here but the bottom line is that rents are cheap compared to elsewhere in the council area and people are queuing up to rent garages so we didn’t really have any problem in deciding to increase rents by 7% for the next year.

Housing Revenue Account Capital Programme

Bit of a mouthful but this is essentially the officers proposals for how they will spend money on upgrading council houses over the next four years and there’s a lot of unknowns in it, not least the current rate of construction industry inflation, which is high but also other factors outwith the council’s control so these are largely to set a direction of travel. As you’ll see if you read the paper there’s an ongoing programme of replacing kitchens and bathrooms and rewiring as well as external work but the biggest expense is heating and energy efficiency including replacement of windows and doors.

Area Roads Capital Programme

Again a report on how the council is going to spend its money this year, this time on roads, for us to agree.

If you drive around the Highland Council area you soon realise that although some of our roads need some work we are in a far better position that the north and, especially, the west but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be maintaining them and the main works are going to be on the A939 Nairn to Grantown road and the B9007 Ferness to Carrbridge road but there’s also work to be done in Nairn High Street and other places. Again see the paper and appendix 2 for a complete list.

Community regeneration funding

This was one to which we’d given a lot of thought, both before and at the meeting, as we had four applications to consider and not enough money. In the end we agreed to give £28,666 to the Nairn Access Panel, whose plans to make the beach more accessible for those with disabilities are now well advanced, and the remaining £54,790 for the next stage of the Team Hamish work on the Links. There’s a press release online about this so if you want to know more about both these projects take a read of that.

Common Good

We reviewed the audited accounts for 2021/22, the quarter 3 monitoring for the current year, and the budget for 2023/24. Again there’s a report online if you want to know more but I think the decisions we made which will interest people the most is that we agreed to create a Nairn Common Good Fund Officer post to support the development of the Fund and its associated project work and we also agreed the addition of a Common Good Events budget of £10,000.

I really need to do a longer post about the Common Good as there’s lots to talk about with this but that’s probably going to be a post on its own.

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Council house rents

Following on from the above where we set garage rents the council’s Housing and Property Committee met on Thursday and among other things they agreed to increase council house rents by 4% across the Highlands.

I was a somewhat stormy debate which you can watch online (start at item 3) and it leaves the housing repairs and maintenance budget short by £708,000 (repairs and maintenance has to be funded directly from rents, unlike the capital programme I mentioned above).

It means the average council house rent in the Highlands will go from £79.97 per week to £83.17 per week for the coming year.

Inverness waste transfer station

One of the joys of being a councillor is that you get to go around interesting public infrastructure and I got to do that on Wednesday.

This is the new Inverness waste transfer station near the ICT football stadium where domestic waste from all around the area will be taken off refuse trucks from the Nairn and Inverness areas and then loaded into big articulated trailers to be sent south for processing and disposal, so avoiding the need to land fill.

It's basically a huge shed with roller doors to let the lorries in and out and bays to dump the waste into and then re-load from but what blew me away is the fire control system. Not only is there a sprinkler system over the whole roof (the dark red pipes in the photo below) but there are also four remote controlled water cannon, one attached high up each wall. They're controlled from a room elsewhere in the site whether the operator can look at the shed via infra-red cameras so that they can see exactly where the fire is and steer the water jet.

The system will use so much water when in operation that it can't rely on mains pressure. Instead it has its own water tank (also very big) and a pump house (engine powered, so can run even during a power cut).

You'll probably have guessed by now that fires in domestic waste are a common problem and apparently batteries are often responsible.

I found the whole thing fascinating, as you can probably tell, and I asked if we could back once it was in operation. We can.

Speeding in Auldern

I had another meeting on Friday about the plans to address the problems of speeding and rat running through Auldearn, which unfortunately becomes part of the unofficial Nairn bypass at busy times.

The current proposal is for a raised speed table at the zebra crossing by the school and then either speed cushions or more raised tables at both ends of High Street and also on Lethen Road. This will be going out to consultation first with the aim of getting everything in place by the summer if all goes to plan. This will be funded by “Safer Routes to Schools” so it’s not affected by Highland Council’s budget and capital programme reviews.

While we’re waiting for this work to be done the police have increased patrols at peak traffic times which they’re hoping will help with speeding issues.

Teachers’ Strike

If you’re a parent you should have been told about this already but just to let everyone else know that some teaching unions including the largest, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) are taking strike action on Tuesday across all Highland Council schools as part of a rolling programme of strikes across the country over pay. All schools will be closed.