Recently the Highland Council put up the white flag and paid
Nairn Common Good fund back 187K for losses incurred from failure to raise the
caravan site rental at regularly agreed intervals in line with inflation. A
report for the chief executive on the background to the sad saga was not in the
public domain at the time when the repayment decision was made at the full
council however. Tonight at River CC’s regular meeting, the Area Leader, Liz
was present and made a statement that gripped the attention of Community
Council members and those on the public benches alike. She said:
“I just wanted to say something about the Common Good
because there’s obviously been quite a lot about that in the papers recently.
In fairness to previous members that have been on the committee and the area
committee in the Nairn ward, we had raised it several times about increasing
the rent at Parkdean and it had been challenged a few times: in 2001, 2003 and
2005 by local members to get the rent increased and investigated during
different periods of signing the lease or changing the lease and we had a big,
in 2005, a big inventory of Common Good assets and to look at look at the
market value and rents for all the...the rent levels for all our... especially
commercial lets and that was Parkdean which was the main commercial let at the
time.
So in fairness to other members I think it is worth
mentioning that and the report that was done for Steve Barron will be going to
the Audit and Scrutiny committee next week and that will be the full report. It
has got the names redacted out of the officers that have been involved in it
but I have done a bit of investigating myself because I thought “well that’s
not true”, we had asked questions about the rent and why wasn’t it going up and
what could we do to increase it. So it’s
all in there and it is going to the audit and scrutiny next week and it’s easy
enough to see who the officers were if you just go to the minutes and you can
see who was involved at that time. It’s got proposed amendments to the lease in
2001 and who the officers were that were delegated to deal with that.”
Here on the Gurn we had previously called for this report to
be made public (and had in fact submitted a Freedom of Information Request
immediately after the Council meeting) and are delighted that the so far secret
report will enter the public domain next week. Obviously it will be a very well
read and scrutinised document when it does make its debut and goodness knows
what implications might flow from it. More tomorrow on the immediate response
from River CC members to Liz’s dynamite revelations.
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