No River CC cash for NICE

Nairn River Community Council discussed a request from NICE for a funding donation at their meeting in the Community Centre last night. In their request NICE outlined their expenditure so far and gave a detailed breakdown of their proposed expenditure over the next six months. The projected expenditure given was a figure of £11,200. You can see the application letter and the breakdown of projected expenditure costs here. 

Tommy asked the meeting for their views. Simon Noble was quite succinct, he said:

"The point I would make is that there is an issue for the community council in terms of supporting this group in that actually it is not clear what they are asking for. Although they are spelling out what their budgetary plans are, it's not actually clear what the longer term objective would be. I know they have got some charitable objectives that they have laid out which are broadly speaking for the good of Nairn. But my view would be that the benefits of making a contribution would be undermined for us in that it we would be seen to be bound to NICE by having made a contribution because NICE has demonstrated in recent months their willingness to publicise the support which is offered in principle and the risk for the current Community Council would be that our support would be misrepresented in specific situations . I'm not saying that it would be misrepresented but the risk would be that we would be seen to be supporting everything that NICE does when we haven't had the opportunity to contribute to the individual decisions that might be made in specific actions."

Tommy then said, "Also we would lose our independence would we not?"

Then Mike Henderson intervened and asked: "Could we in the future possibly, I'm not speaking about  any particular thing, be at loggerheads with NICE if they take one point of view and you take a different point of view.

There was then some comment from Tommy about potential conflict on planning issues then Mike proposed that no money was donated to NICE. The show of hands supported the motion unanimously.