Year 2, Week 1
Council meetings, Short Term Let licensing, Highland Games, Area Committee, and Grant St Yard ...
My apologies that this post is late but I normally write this on a Sunday and I wasn’t well yesterday.
Council Meetings
Last week was busy for me and Tuesday was particularly bad. I had my first meeting starting at 9am at Highland Council headquarters in Inverness and I ended the last (by then online thankfully) at home at 8:30pm. That day I chaired a full meeting for only the second time: Licensing Board this time. You can watch it online if you really want, but I don’t recommend it as it was all very uncontroversial.
The big meeting was Full Council on Thursday which was pretty routine stuff. The points which I think may be of interest to you are that the council agreed to oppose the sale of disposable vapes, which are causing all sorts of environmental problems (and may have been responsible for the fire at the waste transfer station in Inverness last week), and we also voted to remove the voting rights for the three representatives from churches who sit on the council’s Education Committee.
Short Term Let licensing
If you have short term let (STL) property, or live close to one, then you may want to take a look at the Licensing Committee meeting which took place on Tuesday and is also available to view. In particular items 8.1 and 8.2 which related to two STL licence applications.
Both of these were at the same site and in both cases the objectors were complaining that the septic tank which served the whole site was overloaded which they suggested was due to both properties having eight beds although the properties, and hence the tank, were originally built for six beds, and also not for commercial letting.
I proposed a motion on each application that we place a condition on the licence restricting occupancy to six and in each case the motion was supported by the majority of councillors.
This is significant as we are now starting to see how STL licences can provide some relief for affected neighbours, and I suspect it will also set a precedent when we start to see complaints from properties which have already been granted licences.
Highland Games
At a previous ward area committee meeting we had previously agreed that annual events like the Nairn Highland Games and the Arts and Book Festival, deserve our support but it wouldn’t be appropriate to do that from the Ward Discretionary Fund - which is meant to fund one off expenditure - so we would allocate £10,000 from the Common Good budget for 2023-24 for these sort of events.
With this in mind we had a Ward Business Meeting on Wednesday where, among many other things, we discussed funding for the games and, as a result, officers decided to increase the grant to the Games from £1,000 to £2,500 - to be taken from that Common Good budget.
We also give other implicit funding to the Games in that we cover the commercial waste charges (£1,500) and the council’s Amenities Team Games set up costs, including plant hire (£6,000) so total funding to the Games effectively amounts to £10,000 this year. Money well spent for one of the big events of a Nairn summer.
Nairnshire Area Committee
We held our quarterly Area Committee meeting today via Teams and the whole committee meeting is available to view online. You can find the agenda and all the papers online here.
We began with a recap of what we’d done in our first year and went on to discuss Nairn BID’s proposal for a second term, the consultation on the proposal to dispose of the Grant Street workshop and yard (of which more below), and officers’ Housing Performance Report on council housing in the ward.
The news on the last of these is, on the whole, good with repairs - both urgent and routine - being completed ahead of target times and properties are being re-let promptly although as the Cost of Living Crisis continues to bite rent arrears are rising.
Grant Street Yard
Since I joined the council we have been trying to decide what to do with this derelict workshop and yard in Grant Street that’s owned by the Common Good. I posted about this back in January so if you want the full story then go back to that.
The second consultation has now concluded and a paper reporting the results came to the Area Committee today for decision.
Cllr Fraser declared a conflict of interest and withdrew and, after some discussion, the three remaining councillors agreed to proceed with the sale of the yard in its current condition. You can view my contribution to the debate here.
It’s estimated by officers that the Common Good will probably make around £50,000 from that sale.