"Whatever is happening now in Inverness isn’t working for us at all. We’re not really getting sensible decisions. "

The meeting of the Nairnshire Community Councils returned to a familiar topic on Wednesday night and dissent was still in the air. Dick Youngson said when he introduced the agenda item “Locality planning and projects”:

“Planning, we’ve really not got a lot of say in Nairn now. It’s really gone so far the other way, so far towards Inverness. We’re not really getting any encouragement either to look at projects or locality planning and yet we all know this is the only way for Nairn to survive and that we do have a say and our community, the councillors, the four ward councillors that we’ve got and our ward manager – they should actually be working along with us making decisions. They’re still hell bent on actually going down that road. Whatever is happening now in Inverness isn’t working for us at all. We’re not really getting sensible decisions. 

Moving on into the Nairn planning charrette which was planned. It’s gone dead, we haven’t heard from Scott Delgarno. Not a word about this charrette which has been organised by consultants who have been appointed.  So really, we’re being very badly served by our officials in Inverness. No matter what they say about how good they are as staff members we’re almost being criticised for actually complaining about them. We’re not being well served; it’s high time we had a lot of the decision-taking back in Nairn.

So all these projects, locality planning and the projects, we must progress them. Otherwise nobody else is going to do it. Nobody else is actually going to come up and find money which is available if you look in the right places. Through ourselves and NICE we’re actually hoping to move forward and involve HIE as well. They promised us a meeting, we’re sitting waiting to see what Inverness are going to say first, which is the wrong way round.