Last week the Westies discussed the prospects and potential routes for the Nairn Bypass. Much of the debate centred around the omission of a means of getting on and off the bypass in South Nairn. Towards the end however Rosemary fired a question at Colin:
“What do you think is the expectancy of the arrival of this road? Your honest opinion.”
Colin replied: “I think it’s such a big project. If it is early it will be five years but I’m not a roads engineer.”
“They are hell bent on doing it aren’t they? Where are they going to start?”
“They’ve said all along that they do these things in chunks and where there are hold-ups or things that are technically difficult or there are big legal processes to go through; they’ll be left until later stages but they’ve also said – folk have said, the A9 is in front of this. I don’t believe that though, they’ll be bits of the A9 that are so complex for whatever reason that they’ll have begun stretches of the A96.”
“Well I can remember you saying and some of your other colleagues saying, when it was the Nairn bypass, you all were saying it’s ready to go, we’ve got all the consents and there’s no problem we can do it so this is a package that they can just do. But now it is all different isn’t it? This has all got different routes. This is just not the same,” the Chair of West CC continued her cross examination.
“I’m not conscious there was ever money there to go ahead with a Nairn bypass.”
“No I didn’t think it was money but that we would be ready if…”
“There is a strategic commitment here for a dualling of the A96 and I think we just take advantage of that.”
“Well it would be jolly handy to have a dual carriageway because then all those wind farms in the east could not go through Nairn. I’ve never seen anything like them coming through Nairn and going round the roundabout. It’s absolutely outrageous.”
I wonder if we'll still have wind farms by the time it gets built?
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