Week 6

Buses, roads, funding, and committees ...

The X12 Bus

I’ve had people contact me this week saying that Stagecoach are only intermittently providing the X12 service (which runs from Sainsburys through the Lochloy estate and Nairn into Inverness via the university and Raigmore), apparently due to lack of drivers. This is bad enough for users as it is but it turns out that Stagecoach had already announced back on 9th May that the service would be withdrawn completely from Monday, 4th July.

The good news, such as it is, is that the service 11 will be returning to Nairn on that date (see pages 24 to 26 of this document, I’m afraid it’s not very easy to read) and it will also run on Saturdays, unlike the X12, however the bad news is that it won’t go to the university or Raigmore but will instead go to Ardersier and the airport. It will also take one hour and twenty two minutes to do the complete journey so you may find using the service 10 for part of your journey rather quicker.

I am speaking to officers about this as it’s all a definite downgrade to the bus service for Nairn. Whether anything can be done in the short term I doubt but I will be pressing for improvements to Nairn’s bus services.

Road adoption

This week I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of when the roads in the Montgomerie Drive estate off Lochloy Road in Nairn are finally going to be adopted. Some of them are now over 15 years old so it has taken a ridiculously long time to get this done.

The good news is that officers tell me that they are now in the last stages of doing this. They’re raised various “snagging” issues with Springfield which have been resolved (hence the selective re-surfacing recently) but I have pointed out some more snagging issues which have been missed so we may have to wait a bit longer yet but the good news is that all the roads in the estate are going to be adopted “soon” and, in the meantime, the Council continues to treat them like adopted roads for most purposes (e.g. gritting and bin collection).

More funding opportunities

I am trying to alert you to funding opportunities for organisations you may be involved with as they arise and I got alerted to a long list this week so rather than including them here I’ve put them online for you to read over.

Licensing and planning

On Monday I have my first meetings of both the Licensing Committee and Licensing Board and then on Thursday I have my first meeting of the South Planning Applications Committee (SPAC).

In the ward the Licensing Board includes an application from Uncle Bob’s in Nairn for a major variation of premises licence and SPAC includes an application for siting of four camping pods and associated works at Rosevalley House, Cawdor. All residents local to both should have been long since notified and I note that the latter has provoked quite a lot of comment.

The Licensing Committee is also being briefed on the licensing of short term let properties something about which I’ve spoken here before and, it now seems, I may not have got all the facts so I will be taking notes and asking questions on Monday and will be reporting back.