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You may remember I wrote a few posts earlier last year on the topic of the Inverness West Link – the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Inverness’s peripheral road connecting the A9 and A96 with the A82.

To recap briefly (and for a fuller explanation read these blog posts in chronological order), I’d left you at the point whereby I’d been ignored by most of my councillors but finally referred by my MSP to the relevant member of council staff. I’d emailed him, got an out of office reply (he was on holiday), and I forgot about it.

The specifics of what I’d written about were two of the key options for completing the bypass:

Option 6 – This option involved running the road through the beautiful Canal Park, one of Inverness’s biggest and best green spaces, and necessitating the removal of various sporting facilities. This was the option the council voted for in 2012. It was claimed by Highland Council to be just £27m, but the problem as I saw it was that there was an unknown figure to add to this to cover the cost of proposed new sports facilities that the council would introduce as compensation for those facilities lost. What was this extra cost?

Option 7 – This option was a simple, though admittedly more expensive, high-level bridge that did not involve destroying any parkland or sports facilities. It was by far and away the most popular option among the people of Inverness. It cost £68m. My problem, however, was that it also included an extra and arguably unnecessary second swing bridge at Tomnahurich. If that was removed from the assessment, what would option 7 (the big bridge connection alone) really cost?

Given the questions I wanted to ask about each option, I was concerned that the assessment of £27m versus £68m was simply not an accurate reflection.

The answers, thanks to the genuinely helpful council official, are found in the following extract from his email to me in July 2012:

1.       The cost of option 6 at £27.22m includes land and accommodation works costs.  These land and accommodation works costs include for relocating sporting facilities where there is an impact arising from the project.  This is on an equivalence basis of replacing like for like.   For example where 4 holes of the golf course are affected then 4 new holes will be provided. However the Council when they approved option 6 asked officials to consider and look at enhancing the sporting and leisure facilities in the Torvean and Ness-side area.  Part of this is relocating the entire golf course to the north side of the A82 trunk road such that golfer would no longer have to cross the trunk road.  This is something that the planning department intend developing by holding a Charrette with all interested parties and stakeholders in early September.  The Charrette will look at the big picture and the opportunities for land use enhancements in the area such that this will provide added benefit to the members and users of sporting and leisure organisations that currently operate in this area.

2.       Option 7 as you say is costed at £67.75m .  The tandem canal bridges layout  which is included in this project has been costed at £11.2m and is part of these costs.

Hopefully this is quite clear, but let me summarise it anyway: option 6 contained unknown extra costs for sporting facilities in Torvean and Ness-side that had not yet been finalised as they were dependent on a consultation. Meanwhile option 7 is actually £11.2m higher than it fundamentally needs to be.

This means that what we were told was a choice between £27.22m and £67.75m, has actually transpired to be a choice between some unknown sum greater than £27.22 or a sum of £56.55m.

The gap of a good £40m between the two options is now, at the very most, a gap of £29m, and probably much less than that due to the unknown sporting facilties costs.

The consequences of this are massive. Basically it means that councillors were lied to (or didn’t investigate, ask or identify the true costs involved), and that the council has lied to the people by feeding us these false figures of £27m and £67m when it was actually £27m or more versus just £56.55m. This is either a dangerous falsehood on the part of the council or, at worst, a spectacular error.

Given that this deception is coming alongside the destruction of lovely green space in our already carelessly developed city, the anger people will feel is understandable. Yes, option 7 involves millions of pounds more, and yes it is a lot of money at a time of austerity. However the important point is that the millions of pounds gap between the two options is not as big as we were first led to believe, and still does not justify the destruction of Canal Park.

Indeed, many people from what I’ve read are of the opinion that until the shortfall can be found that would allow option 7 to be implemented, actually not doing anything at all and leaving the peripheral road incomplete in the short term is a better way forward than building option 6. In other words, option 6 is so awful that even doing nothing to solve the traffic flow problems represents a better way forward.

Now, when I got the email from the council official in July, I should have blogged all this straight away. However, I forgot, I was busy, I was then on holiday myself… and gradually it all slipped my mind.

I was motivated to return to it all just recently, however, by an online petition I was alerted to, aiming to get as many people behind the prevention of option 6 as possible. The number of signatories is currently approaching one thousand. The organiser of the petition sent an email around to all signatories the other day, saying (among other things):

In April the council will submit a planning application and I hope that at that time many of us will submit objections. If anyone has experience of planning matters perhaps they would be kind enough to contact me and we could share any insights or advice around this group.

So, what can you do? Well, if this affects you and you are in the Inverness area, you could…

1. Sign the petition, and share it with your friends in the area and encourage them to sign it too.
2. Do as the organiser suggests and watch out for the planning application in order to object to it.
3. Get in touch with the organiser, via the petition link, to offer any help you can.
4. Write to your local members of the Highland Council, especially those who were newly elected last year and were not party to the vote taken to go ahead with option 6, telling them that the figures used to inform the vote were false.

As I think I said in a previous post on this matter, I’m not much of a militant when it comes to getting involved in local campaigns. But there is a lot at stake here. Fingers crossed that democracy, common sense and environmental concern prevails.

It’s a sometimes curious feeling, living in a city that doesn’t exist.

You may think Inverness is a real place. There are “Welcome to Inverness” road signs on the main roads as you approach it. You can walk its streets, see its sights, feel the fresh breeze and be deafened by the squawk of seagulls.

That doesn’t mean it exists, though. Everything you sense is Inverness, isn’t really Inverness at all.

It’s something else.

Fear not, though. The problem is a political one, rather than a conceptual one. The problem, in essence, is that there is no political entity that defines the city of Inverness.

Inverness was designated a Royal Burgh in the thirteenth century, though I have no idea what its geographical limit was at the time. Later, it was the county town of Inverness-shire and then a part of Inverness District Council, but those both included much more than the urban settlement, and now it is a part of the even larger Highland Council. There is an Inverness City Committee of the Highland Council, admittedly, but that extends way beyond the city to incorporate the Loch Ness area. Quite what the “Welcome to Inverness” road signs designate, then, is not clear because it’s certainly not any of the above.

Meanwhile the Member of Parliament (for the UK parliament) is for a huge constituency (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey), and the Member of the Scottish Parliament serves the slightly trimmer Inverness and Nairn constituency.

So we know what, administratively, the city is a part of.

What it consists of, however, is unknown. Even when Inverness was formally designated a city in 2000 as one of the “millennium cities”, the “letters patent” were handed to Highland Council rather than to any body with “Inverness” in its name. Then, when someone applied for a coat of arms for the new city, it was rejected in 2008 by the Lord Lyon, Scotland’s custodian of heraldry, because there was nothing to award the coat of arms to.

As the Lord Lyon stated at the time, the problem was that there was not a specific City Council that governed Inverness and Inverness alone:

“There is nothing to grant arms to. Arms is property that must belong to someone.”

Nothing to grant arms to. Let’s just dwell on that – there is nothing that can receive something on behalf of Inverness.

Because it doesn’t exist, people. Inverness doesn’t exist! Everything we thought was real in our lives here in the city is a mere sham, a mirage, a deception.

It’s like The Matrix, with more bureaucracy.

The concept of the city has always posed various dilemmas and curiosities. Is Inverness airport in Inverness? Are the eastern suburbs, such as Smithton or Culloden, a part of the city? Does it even include the retail park and forthcoming new campus just to the east? And how about Clachnaharry? Who, frankly, knows?

Inverness’s existential crisis has come to the fore again just recently, with the Inverness Courier reporting that the council is working simultaneously from two different definitions of the city. One is an old Royal Burgh boundary, and the other is the Inverness district boundary used as part of the Inner Moray Firth Local Development Plan.

The article reports that Richard Laird, a local councillor in the city, is exploring the problem. He is trying to seek clarity because there is an impact on what areas qualify for certain pots of money and what the city as a whole is entitled to on account of its size.

This all sounds very technical, but it’s not just an obscure administrative problem. When there are funding consequences, then it suddenly becomes very important.

Not getting the funding you’re entitled to is potentially serious; whereas simply not existing is something you could live with.

The Council is looking into the problem, according to the Courier article, and will report later on in 2013.

In the meantime, Inverness waits for the truth.

If indeed something that doesn’t exist is capable of waiting…

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll be aware of a couple of posts I wrote a while back on the issue of the completion of the Inverness west link.  I’ll not bore you with the full details here (the posts themselves should be an adequate backstory), but just want to quickly summarise things here.

1. The most popular option, a bridge across the Ness and Caledonian Canal to link the A82 with the Southern Distributor, was rejected by the council in favour of a route that went through Canal Park.
2. The high-level bridge was costed at £67m (and was known as option 7) and the option chosen was costed at £27m (known as option 6).
3. I noticed that option 7 included extra work at Tomnahurich bridge that didn’t seem essential to the completion of the link, so I wanted to know how much lower the £67m could be if it wasn’t for that extra work at Tomnahurich.
4. I also noticed that option 6 was announced alongside new funding for sports facilities at Canal Park; partly to compensate for the road ploughing through it and partly to take the opportunity to develop things further.  I wanted to know how much extra this money was, and therefore how much higher than £27m option 6 actually would be.
5. I wrote to my four councillors and the city provost with these questions, and disgracefully I received a (fairly incomplete) response from only one of them.
6. I also wrote to my MSP to ask for his input.

Thankfully, my MSP (with some chasing) managed to get the full and comprehensive answer I was looking for.  Almost, anyway. Through him, a council official sent a very helpful response (I’ll happily upload it if anyone wants) that included a lot of good information, not least the fact that actually many cars travelling north into Inverness did not actually want to bypass the entire city; just avoid the congested city centre.  Fair enough.  That’s new information that it would have been good to know, and presumably would have been easy to supply.

The letter didn’t, however, supply the figures I wanted to answer the questions I outline in points 3 and 4 above.  So I wrote back to the official who is away for a few weeks (as am I).  I’ll blog again later in the summer once I hear back.

Of course, keen watchers of local matters in Inverness will be aware that there was an entirely different model being advocated all along – that of a tunnel.  It seems to have merit yet to have not received any serious consideration by the council.  This is worrying and represents a pretty poor approach by the council.  Though it’s good to know that, according to the local rag, this will now be looked again, at least briefly.  And that article notes what I fear, that the £27m v £67m may not have been the true comparison after all.

The saga continues…

I voted today in the local council elections.  Being something of a politics and electoral systems geek, I always enjoy voting. Especially when it is the Single Transferable Vote, introduced for Scottish councils in 2007.

STV is by far my favourite electoral system, because it is roughly proportional, it gives you multiple representatives (a good thing where a single representative, like with our MPs, may be hated or mistrusted by a signficant minority), and allows you to make preferences rather than a stark, absolute choice.  Politics is about relativity rather than absolutes, and our voting system should reflect that too.

The problem today, however, came in with deciding who to vote for.  I believe our council to be thoroughly deficient, filled mostly with second-rate councillors who lack much in the way of vision and creativity for this city and the wider region.  That’s evident in some of the terrible planning decisions made over the years in Inverness, plus the spectacular lack of leadership in representing our city externally.

From the poorly-managed development and transport infrastructure of our city, to backwards decisions like Inverness’s absurd and repressive midnight curfew, and then of course the disgrace that was the decision about the completion of the city’s bypass that I’ve blogged about before (and will do again in the coming weeks).

Inverness getting its own local authority, like most of Scotland’s other cities, would be a good way of starting to address this mismanagement; would directly-elected mayors.  That’s one constitutional issue where I am impressed by developments in England.

More than anything, then, the council needs fresh blood.  Last time in 2007, when I was living in Glasgow, I gave my first preference to the one SNP candidate and second preference to the Greens.  This time around, as part of the SNP’s nationwide push to win more councils, they are putting up two candidates in a lot of places, including  my constituency here in Inverness – one an incumbent, the other a new face.  The latter got my first preference.

Disappointingly there is no Green candidate to then transfer to, the only other party standing besides the untouchable Labour, Tory and LibDem options being the terrifying Scottish Christian Party.  So my second vote will go not to the incumbent SNP member, but to an independent candidate who is standing again, for whom I have a great deal of time and who I consider an exception to the rabble of incompetence that purvades Highland Council.  It’s the first time I’ve ever rejected the opportunity to vote for an SNP candidate in any election.  What’s happening to me?

The SNP are working hard, I understand, to win Highland Council, as they are in many places, not least in the well-publicised battle for Glasgow City.  STV being a bit more complicated to count, however, means that the results will not come through until later on Friday by which time I will be away for the weekend.  Perhaps I’ll blog again next week reflecting on what could be some very interesting results.  It’s an exciting time in Scottish politics, and while I don’t hold to the view that these council elections are a litmus for the independence referendum, today’s vote will certainly have an impact on vital local services in the years to come and the relative strength and confidence of the political parties.

Whether or not it will improve the quality of decisions being made about Inverness, however… well, hope springs eternal.

I blogged nearly a month ago about the terrible decision being put to Highland Council to drive the final part of the western end of Inverness’s bypass through a lovely park.  As you’ll read in that post, I’d written to my four local councillors, the city’s provost and my MSP about some of the issues around the decision.  I’d asked some questions that sought to challenge the claim that option 6, the recommended route, was as cheap as it appeared, and that option 7, the most popular and least environmentally-destructive route, needed to be as expensive as it was.

Since then, I’ve had only two responses, both somewhat “holding” messages.  One was a brief email from one of my councillors, saying that she needed to talk to the council staff involved and would get back to me.  The other was from my MSP, Fergus Ewing, who gave a bit more details relating to the route never being a part of the trunk route network, and who promised to get back to me with more information about my specific questions once he’d got it from the council.

Now it all seems a little academic, seeing as the recommendation that went to the full council, to go ahead with option 6, was approved on the 1st of March.  Although the minutes are yet to be published on the council website, I was astonished to discover just the other day that the decision was unanimous – every single councillor in attendance supported option 6.

That no councillor sought to reflect public opinion or challenge the facts of the recommendation is a most curious demonstration of local democracy.  My points still stand, and my desire to get the facts I am seeking remain.  If it turns out that councillors have been acting without the full picture, or more worryingly have neglected to seek it themselves, then it would be a terrible indictment of local government.

I really ought to chase up those councillors I’ve yet to hear back from.  Nearly a month is too long to go without so much as an acknowledgement of my email.  Watch this space.

While there is much good about Inverness, there are also many things that need sorting out.  Part of the problem is that in the past decade or so the city has mushroomed, with huge development and expansion that has entirely outstripped the pace of services and infrastructure.  One example is the fact that transport has lagged behind the city’s growth, with many communities ill-served by buses, and of course the eastern suburbs failing to be served by a rail line that runs right through them.

On the roads, too, things are not good.  With the growth of the city, capacity cannot keep up with demand.  Years ago, a traffic jam was an alien concept, whereas today there are too many of them on Inverness’s main routes at rush-hour.

One long-discussed plan has been to bridge the canal and river at the south of the city to relieve the pressure on the city centre bridges, the current only options to get from the west to the east of Inverness.  Look at this map, for instance:

View Larger Map

You can see the A82 on the left of the picture, running southwest to Fort William and beyond.  On the right, there is the A9 (to Perth) and the A96 (to Aberdeen).  The so-called “southern distributor”, marked as the B8082, runs across the south of Inverness, connecting all those major trunk roads and essentially forming a bypass.

Only there’s a gap – you can see on the bottom left that the southern distributor hits Dores Road and then stops, with nothing connecting it to the A82.  The completion of this gap is known as the Inverness West Link.  Of course, the Caledonian Canal and River Ness are in the way of finishing the link, and this means that if you are travelling from the southwest and want to get east of Inverness, then you need to go through the city centre rather than just skirt the edge of the city via what would be a convenient bypass.  The obvious solution would be a bridge.  Any vaguely intelligent person can see that.

Obvious (or intelligent, for that matter) does not come into the thinking of Highland Council, however.  This bridge has been discussed for years, and finally a consultation was launched last year about a number of options for this missing link, none of which included the obvious route for a bridge and all of which involved a bizarre collection of routes that doubled back towards the city centre (thereby defeating the purpose of a bypass), and most alarmingly carving up Canal Park.

Only after considerable protest was the consultation extended to include more options, one of which, option 7, was the obvious idea of a bridge directly from the southern distributor to the A82.

Have a look at the map above again, and you can see that where the canal and river almost meet each other, there is a green triangle of land called Canal Park.  Zoom in, and ideally switch to satellite mode, and you’ll see more of it.  It’s a marvellous oasis of green in a busy city and a home to a variety of sporting and other leisure activities.  There’s a lovely wee lake with boats, there’s a children’s play park, a miniature railway, plus of course the city’s main leisure centre, and pitches which are the homes of Inverness’s rugby and American football clubs.

And yet it is right through Canal Park that all but option 7 would plough. And it is one of those other options, option 6, that has emerged from a council working group as the preferred option for the full council’s consideration.  Compare the two options on the right (and if these images aren’t clear, find them among the presentations here on the council’s website.

You can see that option 6, rather than crossing the river and canal together in a single bridge, sweeps northwards and crosses over into Canal Park and from there crosses the canal next to the existing Tomnahurich Bridge.  You therefore need to go almost into the city centre again to come back out – of course, cutting across that once-green space of Canal Park.

Compared this to option 7, which does nothing more complicated than take a direct route over the canal and river in a oner.  It looks from the picture on the right that it cuts across green space, but that is in fact nothing more environmentally worthy than a disused quarry.

The working group, as I say, has gone for option 6.  What a terrible choice to make.  You don’t have to go far to find condemnation of this, with almost every comment you could find on the internet criticising the short-sightedness of this decision.

Of  course, option 6 is cheaper.  Considerably so.  There is, it is claimed, no money in the coffers to pay for the high-level bridge of option 7, especially since the Scottish Government a few years back mysteriously washed their hands of the west link by claiming it wasn’t important enough to qualify for central funding.

But because of the destruction of Canal Park, doing nothing is actually better than implementing option 6.  For sure, the traffic problems will remain and the west link will remain uncompleted, but this is better than losing the green space at the park.  It would be much better for the council to implement no option at all, hold option 7 as a prospective plan, and do whatever it can to lever money out of the Scottish Government (our local MSP is a minister in the SNP government, after all) or even, if necessary, the private sector.

And option 7 doesn’t even need to be as expensive as it is claimed.  Part of the plan for option 7 involves an extra bridge at Tomnahurich (so if one has to close for canal traffic, there is always another open).  Great idea, but not so urgent at this stage.  Why can’t option 7 be costed and implemented with the extra canal bridge to be installed at a later date when there is more money?  There’s no need to ruin Canal Park just because of some poor bean-counting.

One argument in favour of option 6 is that it will not actually destroy the whole of the park: as you can see, it merely cuts along the edge of it.  But that’s enough of an impact for some facilities to be lost and for others to be disrupted by the constant noise of a busy road.  This presents safety issues for what is supposed to be a family-friendly open space for people to be free to run, walk, play and enjoy the fun of exercise, sport and relaxation.

Moreover, the lovely walk along the thin slither of land between the river and the canal, which takes you a few miles south to Dochgarroch locks, would be made all the trickier for having to cross what is in effect a bypass in order to reach it.

I don’t really get involved in much in the way of active politics these days, but I am absolutely furious at the decision to recommend option 6.  It is desperately short-sighted and will have a terrible environmental impact on Inverness.  I’m also somewhat concerned at the lack of recent activity from an action group set up to oppose anything other than option 7.

I hate being a “disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells” about things like this, but do feel increasingly angry at the terrible decision-making we are subject to.  And to be honest, I don’t even spend that much time at Canal Park – imagine how much more angry people will be who do go there regularly with their children, or who are involved in the clubs that will be affected.

Disgruntled or not, though, I am going to write to my local councillors, to those involved in the recommendation, and to my MSP.   I’ll keep you posted as to any responses.

Faith, hope and charity are quite a trilogy.  They are a trio of saints, three WW2-era RAF planes, a key verse in the Bible and even a play. But here in Inverness, they are most famous as the Three Graces which used to reside above a magnificent columned building on the corner of High Street and Castle Street, where the architectural (not to mention gastronomic) monstrosity McDonald’s now sits.

When their home was abolished they spent time in exile in Orkney before being recently bought by the council and returned to Inverness.  They now sit on the riverside, just in front of Ness Bank church.  They are quite attractive statues and tastefully fit their new home.  Here they are on the right, standing in a row with their names beneath them.  Click on the picture to see it in detail.

However, sometimes it takes an outsider to see something about a place (something I love about travel).  Recently we had some visitors staying with us, and when we walked along the river one of them pointed out that the names are in the wrong order.

Faith, suggested our friend, is the one in the middle clutching a Bible (who stands above the word “hope”).  Hope is the one with that great metaphor of hope, an anchor, perched atop the legend “charity”.  Charity is the one giving something to drink to a child, oblivious to being called “faith” by the plinth.  Despite being free-standing statues with a custom-made plinth, they have been clearly placed in the wrong order.  Either that or they’ve been playing musical chairs when nobody’s watching.  I can imagine the council stating the names are not meant to indicate the statue directly above, but that runs counter to the way that anyone would logically interpret the scene.

Is this an intentional placing, or has Highland Council made a gaffe that has, until now, been unnoticed?