Nairn South planning appeal meeting " Really quite scary"

Alastair Noble speaking at the combined West and Suburban Community Council meetings earlier this evening said: 

"We all went to a meeting with the Reporter last Monday night and that, I’m going to be quite blunt about this, was really quite scary. We have a position where the whole of Nairn, the three councillors who have a say in this and the community councils, everybody else is saying we don’t want Nairn South. And the decision rests with one man who can make an arbitrary decision based on what he wants which is a quite narrow interpretation of the planning rules. So I think we have just got to be very aware that this process doesn’t strike me as very democratic and can be quite worrying. 

I’m looking at Colin now, I mean that Highland Council’s corporate position is quite clear that the councillors in their wisdom and I think quite rightly, turned this plan down. My understanding is that Michael and Laurie are speaking, and maybe we want to ask Colin why he is not speaking and how he could speak and how he could help that. But the thing that came up most clearly was the developers and the Reporter seem to be very clear that, for example, they have reached an agreement that the TEC services people from Highland Council will turn up and the reason they are turning up is that they are the local experts and they know more about roads and the roads in Nairn than anaybody else and he  must hear from there. That was countered and I think quite rightly by Highland Council’s legal advisor saying that the Highland Council are going to employ an independent transport person/planner to give an independent view which would be supportive of Highland Council’s position because what was raised by the audience was that TEC services could be seen as a hostile witness in this context. It’s getting really quite tricky to understand this and one of the things that I think that we want to discuss tonight is if the Reporter follows this line of thinking he might well ask the planners to turn up and they could again be hostile witnesses and we might need Highland Council to think seriously about having a planning person à la Sandown.”

For those that are not regular readers of the Gurn Colin is Cllr Colin MacAulay and Laurie and Michael are Cllrs Michael Green and Laurie Fraser.