Nairnshire Area Committee
Your ward members met on Monday for our quarterly Area Committee meeting which is where we make formal decisions about the council’s activity in the ward. You can watch it online here.
You can find all the papers for the meeting online here. It was mainly routine stuff but key points I’ve like to mention are that:
we agreed to allocation of another £2,000 out of the Nairn and Auldearn Poor Fund to the '“People’s Pot” currently administered by Nairn CAB. Our long term aim is to make use of all the money, about £35,000, which has been lurking unused for far to long in various historic “poor funds” (see appendix 1 of the paper for details of that).
we reviewed activity on the Nairn Common Good Fund and agreed to extend the post of Nairn Common Good Officer for another two years and also to continue with the Nairn Common Good Engagement Group for another year with some changes to the way it operates.
we were presented with statistics for the local schools group (the academy and the four primaries which feed into it). It’s a fairly long paper with lots of figures but I would highlight in particular the table at the top of page 7 which shows that more children go on to higher or further education (68.70%) from Nairn Academy than across Highland (53.63%) or Scotland (66.92%) so they’re clearly doing something right.
we noted that the Nairn and Nairnshire Local Place Plan is now in its final stages of validation by The Highland Council as both an Area Place Plan and a Local Place Plan and agreed “to adopt the plan as one source of evidence of community aspiration, to inform wider decision making about spatial planning, service delivery, options for asset management, development and investment towards the continuous improvement and wellbeing of the Nairn and Cawdor Ward. We look forward to any community groups, either currently or newly formed, to take forward any projects for the enhancement of the ward.”
20mph speed limits
At the council Economy & Infrastructure Committee on Thursday the council agreed to make permanent the new 20mph speed limits in communities across Highland. I spoke in the debate and said:
My experience with the 20mph limit is entirely different to some other members. In Nairn […] people are extremely happy with the 20mph limits. In fact the problem I have is I have the public coming to me and saying “why haven’t we got the 20mph limit in my street?”. The A939 south of the A96 is a classic example of this past the cemetery. Cllr Stewart talks about rural areas [who, he claimed, didn’t want the limit]. In fact in my ward the rural areas were excluded from the 20mph limit and I have communities, like at Cawdor, who are now saying to me “why did we miss out on 20mph limits?” and are asking if in the next round they can be included. So I will be voting for this motion, certainly I have had absolutely no residents saying anything else to me other than that I should be doing so.
For me the next step now is to look at limits in other places: like the B9090 through Cawdor and the A939 Grantown Road in Nairn, both of which I mentioned about, but also like Lochloy Road through Kingsteps (which has a frankly ludicrous 40mph limit) and Lethen Road in Auldearn.
Councillors’ expenses
All Scottish councils have to publish the salaries and expenses of their councillors each financial year and Highland Council is no exception so they’re now available online.
If you look at the figures for the whole council you will notice considerable variation in expenses claimed. Two factors come into play here. Firstly the council covers a vast area, so some councillors face a very long drive from places like Skye and Lochinver, sometimes staying overnight in Inverness before morning meetings so that they can be there on time. Secondly some councillors choose, for whatever reason, not to claim some or all of their expenses.
I’ve extracted the entries for your four ward councillors which you can see below:
Apologies that this is an image so may be hard to see on mobile devices and will be unreadable if you’re blind or partially sighted so here’s a very brief summary of each of our salaries and expenses:
Laurie Fraser - £21,846.96 plus £397.33
Micheal Green - £23,448.96 plus £763.45
Barbara Jarvie - £21,345 plus £1,111.78
Paul Oldham - £21,345 plus £1,579.70
Road closures
Around Nairn
BT/Openreach continue to lay more fibre and, for a change, they’re in Nairn rather than out in the rural areas of the ward and they’re closing a section of Tradespark Road beginning on Monday, 2nd June.
They are also temporary closing the C1159 Lochloy Road at Kingsteps at the location shown on the map below, beginning on Wednesday, 11th June.
As usual with BT/Openreach closures, for both of these diversions will be in place and local and emergency access will be maintained.
A96 beyond the airport
Meanwhile further to the west of us we’ve finally got rid of the Delnies traffic lights but I’ve now had news that Amey is undertaking drainage improvements on the A96 from the Inverness Airport roundabout westwards for 1.2km to the turn to old Tornagrain and Dalcross. There will be temporary traffic lights (and will be four way when they’re doing the roundabout!). This will run from Monday, 9th June to Friday, 18th July.
The only small consolation is that works will take place on weekdays from 9:30am to 3:30pm so won’t affect rush hour traffic. This is a trunk road so outwith Highland Council’s control but you might want to comment on these works to Amey. Contact details here.
Planning applications
The following new applications were logged since I last posted:
25/01727/FUL - 12 Seabank Road, Nairn, IV12 4EU - Extension to house
To find details search on the reference number on the planning portal where you can also find details on how to comment.