Community council appeals for volunteers

A heartfelt plea was made last night for more members of the public to join the North Kincardine Rural Community Council.
The community council’s planning officer Colin Pike was chairing the meeting which was attended by 11 members of the public and three Aberdeenshire councillors (including me!). There were six community councillors.
Colin appealed for volunteers as the community council is lacking a secretary and a chairperson. “We need fresh faces,” he said.
As usual the meeting in the Lairhillock primary school had a packed agenda. Here are some of the highlights I have picked out:
– Representatives of the Aberdeen bypass will be at the next meeting on 16 January to discuss progress with the project. There were many comments about the muddy state of local roads. Apparently the contractors have added six additional road sweepers to their fleet. The AWPR will be shutting down for the festive period on Friday 23 December, and restarting on Monday 9 January (thought there will be a skeleton staff to deal with security and maintenance issues. AWPR staff will return on 4 January.
Kees Witte reported on the well-attended public meeting about broadband provision in the area. There were 135 responses to a survey in the South Deeside View which showed an average download speed of 1.5 megabytes. There was hope that the various avenues of pressure would bring about an improvement: a “wave of action”, as Colin Pike described it.
Various planning applications were discussed, including plans to replace a bothy with a house for a sheep farmer and a proposed Craigneil wind farm to the west of Meikle Carewe. A public meeting in the Lairhillock school had attracted few people, which apparently pleased the developers as it signalled to them there was little opposition. The turbines would be 135 metres high to the blade tip. The Meikle Carewe turbines are 70 metres high.
– The Maryculter senior citizens Christmas event is to receive a grant of £200.
– A suggestion that the community council lodges a planning application on behalf of the Maryculter Woodland Trust met with a mixed reaction, and some caution. The advantage would have been that there would be a reduced fee. The plan is for a shipping container in the woods to house equipment for the trust and the nature kindergarten Mucky Boots. After a lengthy debate the request was withdrawn by trust chairman Ed Thorogood.

– The meeting also heard that Aberdeenshire Council’s new household waste and recycling centre at Badentoy is now open, from Thursdays to Mondays.

– The new town of Chapelton is progressing slowing with 93 houses occupied.

– There was no police report.
– The community council was split over whether to continue to hold meetings in the school (free, sufficient lit parking, and central) or return to the Corbie Hall at Maryculter (£10 an hour) which is now fully operational again after last winter’s floods. The discussion continues, and a decision will be made by the year end.

Views sought on budget cuts

Aberdeenshire Council is asking residents for their views on how to cut £26m from the annual budget. Suggestions being put forward by the council’s SNP/Labour administration include reducing bin collections and cutting road maintenance, and saving £360,000 by transforming lawns into wild meadows. Playgrounds and sports pitches would not be affected.
Further information can be found at www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/budgetengagement
The consultation will close on Tuesday 3 January. Reports will be submitted to councillors in January to give time to consider all views for the budget setting council meeting on 9 February.

Newtonhill garden waste service axed

Bad news for Newtonhill people. My efforts to save the seasonal garden waste service at the Bettridge Centre have not been successful. I know how valued the April to November service has been, but my call for even a reduced service has failed.

Today I received the following response from the council’s waste manager: “I do appreciate the benefits that the service provides to those residents who are able to walk to the collection point, and this would apply to many people living near to household waste and recycling centres where people living nearby are able to use them on foot because they don’t have access to a car or it may be quicker to use a wheelbarrow or wheeled bin than to load/unload and later clean the car. However, as you will appreciate this is a very small number of people within the whole of the Shire and not a service that is available to the majority; we are not looking at accessibility by foot being one of the criteria for provision of sites as unfortunately this would not be something we would have the resources to be able to serve.”

She adds: “We are trying to work towards consistency of service across Aberdeenshire based on some agreed criteria, such as the 20 minutes travel time for most people. There are clearly a number of people in Newtonhill who value this service and we could provide some home composting information/support to the community if that would be of interest; of course to this effect we also sell subsidised good quality compost bins to help people compost at home.”

So, the bin lorry will not return in the spring and we will either have to compost more, take green waste to the new recycling centre at Badentoy (or ask friend/family/neighbour to help), or as a last resort put it in the landfill bin. And landfill is the last thing we as a society should be doing.

The information on this link explains why the council does not provide a doorstep garden waste collection service: https://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/waste/other/garden-waste/

My times with Michael Gove

2016-1211-michael-gove-alison-shaw-and-me-1989

Well that was a shock this morning – I fleetingly appeared in Fern Britten’s hour-long interview with Michael Gove on BBC1.

He was talking about his life which included returning to his home city of Aberdeen in the 1980s to be a trainee journalist on the Press and Journal. He and I were photographed on the picket line, with Evening Express reporter Alison Shaw outside the Lang Stracht offices.

We were on strike during 1989-90 over whether Aberdeen Journals workers had the right to be represented by a trade union. The Canadian-owned company used Thatcherite laws to take on the National Union of Journalists. The strike lasted for a year.

Aberdeen Journals has a different owner now.

Recycling centre opens tomorrow

The new household waste and recycling centre in Badentoy Industrial Estate, Portlethen AB12 4ZD will open to the public from tomorrow (Thursday 8 December) at the following times:

Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday – 9am to 4:30pm 
Friday – 9am to 4pm.

There will be temporary sign at the Badentoy Drive entry to direct users to the new centre.

There will three full-time attendants adopting a ‘meet and greet’ manner to assist and direct site users to the appropriate area for disposal of their items and to hopefully improve their experience on site and increase our recycling performance.

The council’s policy is household waste only and no trade waste or tyres accepted at the site. The re-use facility is currently not available as there is no partnership agreement in place at present.

The previous temporary collection service of general waste located in Asda car park every Saturday ceased on 3 December. There will have a member of staff present at the Asda former site on Saturdays 10 and 19 December to ensure no waste is deposited at that location and to direct any potential users to the new site at Badentoy.

AWPR take heed over local roads

A number of local people rightly complained about AWPR joint venture (CJV) still using water bowsers to clean roads, even when temperatures were plummeting. There were also many complaints about the muddy state of the roads.

Here is what Aberdeenshire Council roads officer Bob Gray has just told me:

“I have been at a meeting with the CJV today regarding the issues raised by yourself and your constituents Mark Neville the CJV T.M. manager has taken an action to reiterate to the workforce that this type of behavior will not be tolerated. Aberdeenshire Council have also stated that the level of complaints being received will not be tolerated. Police Scotland were also present at the meeting along with Transport Scotland who are both aware of the situation.

“We will continue to monitor the situation but we emphasised that the situation with regard to mud on the road must be addressed or we will take action under the Roads Scotland Act 1984.”

It is easy to report faulty street lights

Faulty street lights can be a real nuisance at this time of year. If they are reported to the council, 85.6% of faults in Kincardine and Mearns are being fixed within seven days. It’s easy: just click here.
 
Aberdeenshire Council has 44,568 street lights, and so far 4,044 have been changed or converted to LED.
 
The council aims to converted all of them by 2020/21. Each year the council adopts around 500 new lights that were owned by developers – some will not be LED and will require to be replaced.
 
Based on current predictions it is expected to reduce the energy consumption by 45% with a budget for lantern replacement of £6 million. During this period all faulty lights will be replaced with LED as well as those that are part of our column replacement programme; there are separate budgets for this work.
 
Some 3,400 lanterns are dimmed between midnight and 6am. The council also trims 2,571 lanterns, which relates to a reduction in burning hours. Finally 71 lanterns are switched off between midnight and 6am.
 
This year’s lighting programme has reduced the council’s energy consumption so far by 420,000kwh. The cost for all unmetered street lighting and associated equipment for 2015-16 was £2,015,372.

Concerns over Hillside primary school roll

A few local issues at the Kincardine and Mearns Area Committee today.

  • School roll forecasts show that by 2022 Portlethen primary school will be half empty while the soon-to-be-opened Hillside primary school will at 155% capacity. The new school has a capacity for 350 children but the forecast is that it could have to accommodate 543 children.

I pressed learning estates team leader Rachael Goldring on this imbalance and received reassurances. She said that the predictions are based on various assumptions, and because the school is not open yet council officers do not have full information. Accordingly they have used a worst case scenario.

She emphasised it was too early to say with certainty, as there is obviously no history of attendance at the school. Officers will be monitoring the situation on a fortnightly basis, and if mitigation is required, then they will progress that. This could involve taking a fresh look at the catchment areas.

The data which officers use to collate the figures comes from a variety of sources: previous trends such as placing requests, the number of existing pupils, forecast house building rates, NHS data including the number of children registered with the local GPs, population projections and birth rates.

Parental decisions made for August 2017 will allow for more accurate reporting in future years.

Currently there are 173 pupils attending Hillside School classes, with this predicted to rise to 267 in 2017, and 328 in 2018.

– Plans to demolish the now closed Cammies hotel at Cammachmore were approved on a 8-4 vote. The hotel would be replaced by six houses. It is no longer viable as a commercial concern and attempts to sell the hotel have proven fruitless. Planning permission has already been granted to convert it into seven flats, however the meeting was told this is not viable either.

Newtonhill, Muchalls and Cammachmore Community Council objected to the latest plans as the hotel is in the green belt. I agreed with the community council … and with their comment that it would however be reasonable to build on the existing building’s footprint.

However I lost the vote to Cllr Bews’ motion to support the redevelopment. A recommendation will now go to Aberdeenshire Council’s infrastructure services committee for a final decision.

  • Full planning permission was granted for play equipment and a fence opposite the Paddock at the Green in Portlethen. There were eight valid representations, all opposing the presence of the two wooden climbing frames. This was a retrospective application as the play equipment is already there.

Elaine Duffy from Cornerstone spoke on behalf of the residents in Angus Court expressing the concerns of residents about their fears of a loss of privacy, noise and being overlooked. Cllrs Nelson and Bews moved that the recommendation from planning officers be accepted, and this was agreed by the committee.

  • The footpath from Auchlee Gardens to Schoolhill Lane in Hillside is being adopted by Aberdeenshire Council. It runs north from between 6 and 8 Auchlee Gardens.