Friday, January 13, 2012

Crumbling roads, in the Fishertown, across Nairn and the Highlands

Gurnites will have seen the recent material in the Nairnshire Telegraph about Cllr Andrew Purkis’s call for action on the state of the roads in the Fishertown. There was a wee follow up to that at Tuesday night’s meeting when Liz announced she was having a meeting with Andrew to look at some of the problems he has highlighted in the Fishertown.

Oor Graham mentioned that an additional million pounds was to be allocated to road repairs across the Highlands. This seems a bit at odds with information in the Courier today – that article is gathering quite a stream of comments from angry Council Tax payers but maybe Graham’s information hasn’t reached the Inverness mainstream media yet.

Andrew remarked that that million pounds wasn’t going to go very far. Graham said a bit later on in the debate that to get all the roads in Highland into the condition they should be would cost 150 million pounds, around 73 million pounds should be spent every year too but only 50 million pounds is being spent. Graham admitted that this “just didn’t happen yesterday.”

Stephanie Whittaker, herself a Fishertown resident, agreed with Andrew over the state of the Fishertown but argued that the rest of Nairn wasn’t too good either.

Obviously a problem that has been building and maybe one that will probably get worse in the short term no matter who forms the next council administration, they will inherit a crumbling road network in the Highlands. Has anybody got any ideas how this problem could be solved?

3 comments:

Tar Mack said...

Years ago folk would bring out the ashes from their fires to help fill the holes in the road, not too many fires about these days, and not too much money either.
We no longer have the gold to pave the roads as some would like them, I suggest we agree on pot hole repairs for minor roads such as those in the fishertown and await the economic recovery whilst we all drive around a little slower

growtosow said...

fishertown has got signs up about speed anyway, and as it is an build up area anyway folk should not be speeding in the first place, this should be the case for all these areas tradespark boathpark are some examples of were this happens,

smell the instant coffee said...

I really don't understand as to why some people have such difficulty in grasping the reality that years of council tax freeze means a cut in the monies that the council have to spend through inflation. Further to that, there is also less income for the council as the recession halts building work etc

The council has to make some very stark choices and it might be nice smooth roads in a weed free Fishertown, or a care home kept open, I know which I would choose

Time for some councillors to wake up!