Week 7
ASN, buses, and committee meetings
ASN at Millbank Primary School
I, and your other ward councillors, had many emails from parents on Tuesday about suggestions that ASN funding at Millbank was being cut with the loss of five PSAs and one teacher for the next academic year.
This confused me a bit because at the insistence of the SNP group ASN funding was protected in this year's budget but it's officers who decide where that money is spent, not councillors, so I and other councillors referred it on to them. Fiona Shearer, Area Care & Learning Manager, has now written to everyone to explain what is actually happening and has hopefully reassured people that things are not as bad as was advertised.
More on the bus service changes
This week I’ve been talking to officers about the bus services between Nairn and Inverness and the situation is as I feared in that these are completely commercial services, not subsidised by Highland Council in any way, so Stagecoach gets to decide what to run and when.
Stagecoach do have to notify (but not consult) Highland Council 28 days ahead of registering new service, change, or withdrawal with the Traffic Commissioner but all the Council can do is provide feedback and seek information on changes, they can’t do any more than that.
Committee meetings
This week I’ve started going to council committee meetings for the first time. They don’t start in earnest until August but the quasi-judicial committees have to be run regularly so on Monday I had Licensing Committee in the morning where we agreed to bring forward the review of taxi fares in the light of the huge increase in fuel prices. Sadly for taxi drivers there’s a lot of legal steps to go through so they won’t see any changes for quite a while yet and the new fares will only come in a couple of months early as a review was due to start soon anyway.
We also had a briefing from officers on the plans for licensing short term lets. I’ll talk about this some more in a future post.
We also discussed issues relating to various taxi drivers’ licences and, as a result, the committee badly overran and only ended at 1:45pm so after a 15 minutes break for a sandwich most of us started again with Licensing Board which was very, thankfully, uncontroversial and short.
Thursday saw the first meeting of the South Planning Applications Committee and I’m happy to report that I’m now the vice chair, so I get to chair the meeting in whole or part if the new chair, Cllr Thomas MacLennan, is unable to. Hopefully that will happen rarely, in the short term at least!
The application to build a hotel on the site of the Ironworks in Inverness took the longest to consider and, as you’ve probably heard by now, eventually we decided to defer the decision until the next meeting.
Other council related work
I attended the AGM of Nairn River Community Council on Wednesday night which I temporarily chaired for the election of their convener for the coming year.
In addition to the concerns about Millbank school I’ve been contacted by residents about a variety of issues this week including the state of the old cemetery, a collapsing wall outside Tower Court, and planning applications both locally and elsewhere in the Highland Council area. I was also contacted by an American who wanted help with information about his great-great-grandfather who was born in June 1820 in Nairn! (I referred him to Nairn Museum.)