Year 3, Week 17

Community Centre, battery storage, trading on Common Good land, road closures, council leadership team ...

Nairn Community and Arts Centre

This week your ward members had another very useful and informative meeting with the directors of the charity which runs the centre to discuss their future financing plans and they’ve asked me to remind you of their monthly 50/50 prize draw. Enter it and be in with a chance to win half of the total money raised each month.

It costs £5 a month to take part. They are aiming for 500 subscribers and they already have 200 so the monthly prize is currently about £500 and, if they reach their target, it will be £1,250.

They are also looking for business sponsors so if you’re a local business and would like to be seen to be supporting a vital part of our community infrastructure then drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with the right person at the charity.

Battery storage

Following on from my post last week about the BESS schemes proposed around Nairn I had an interesting exchange of emails with Bob who confirmed that the 49.9MW to which they’re all referring is their maximum output, not their maximum storage. This is significant as applications with an output over 50MW have to go to the Scottish Ministers Energy Consent Unit for approval.

Bob also told me that several of the proposed BESSs can store 100MWh and that just one would be sufficient to supply Nairn's households for about 3 days.

I have also had discussion this week with planning officers about what’s going on. They tell me that OFGEM have created a “goldrush” pursuit of sites close to but outwith substation sites. Hence we’ve ended up with what we’re seeing south east of Nairn. What they are aiming to do through the planning process is to favour the least impactful sites and to require through conditions the restoration of those sites when they are no longer needed.

I’m also investigating if we could demand community socio-economic benefits, like the financial benefits some areas of the ward currently get from wind farms.

Traders on Nairn Common Good property

The council issued a reminder this week that it manages the Nairn Common Good for the benefit of Nairn residents – this includes the Links, The Bandstand, most of the West and East beaches and the Riverside area of the town amongst other property - and that all traders operating on that land must register with Highland Council in order to ensure that they have full public liability insurance, proper risk management and safeguarding procedures in place.

This applies to anyone trading on the Links, including: bootcamp, water sports, yoga or any other wellbeing providers who are not operating under rights of access so do check the article if you think this applies to you as this has more details and also a table of charges.

Road closures

Balblair Road close to the entrance to the railway station car park will be closed from Monday, 2nd to Wednesday, 4th September to allow telecom works to be conducted safely.

The C1154 road near Clunas will be closed between 8:30am to 3:30pm on Monday, 9th September.

The U3062 road east of Auldearn will be closed for some days from Monday, 9th September for rolling BT works.

Diversions will be in place for all of these.

Council leadership team

As I’ve mention here before the council is currently in the process of re-structuring its leadership team to create a leaner structure which will save the council £310,000 a year in staffing costs.

We already have a Chief Executive and just three Assistant Chief Executives in place and the next step is to appoint fourteen Chief Officers as the next tier down. I was involved in the interview process this week and the council announced the first five successful candidates on Friday.

Planning applications

No new applications were logged since I last posted.