Charles Bannerman

10 hours ago, The Mantis said:

Even by your standards, that's a cracker. Well played Lazarus 
So the "minefield" that kept Falkirk out in 2003, and on 2 previous occasions, was actually "designed" for ICT 
Elderly men and big spotty teenager prejudices. Remarkable.

Yeh… whatever rocks your boat. If you want to make a big song and dance over the fact that I might better have included the words “clubs like”…. on you go.

I’ve now read the Courier’s report on this meeting and I see the Chairman quoted as saying “We bought the ground around us. We didn’t own the ground until last year.” This raises one or two questions for me.

Precisely which “ground” is being referred to here? The stadium site - initially 9.03 acres but soon extended to 12.88 - was leased for 99 years in 1994 from the Inverness Common Good Fund who owned the land. This comprised the area of the stadium itself and the surrounding car parks. So is it all or part of this area that the Chairman is saying has been purchased from the CGF by the club? Or is it further land beyond the perimeter? And of particular interest here at this time of financial crisis is - where did the money come from?

I imagine that another quote from the Chairman may also attract attention - “Caley Thistle should be a commercial property company with a football club hanging off it.” Thoughts, anyone?

5 hours ago, Scotty said:

I hope this initiative goes well and I have often called for shareholders to offer their proxies to the trust in recent times which is a little different to the current call. With 10% of their own voting rights and potentially a bunch of other small shareholdings proxied to the trust on an official basis, the voting right of the trust could be significantly increased to the point where, like it or not, a fan supported rep could be elected if not amicably agreed to be added (co-opted) to the board. As alluded to above, many power brokers at the club have not had significant personal shareholdings and in one case our chairman at the time had only 250 shares under his name like many of the most basic ICTFC shareholders!  

HOWEVER, I do have to say - as someone who tried this before - that the proof of the pudding will be when asking people to dip their hands in their pockets regularly. You reference Falkirk and Morton above and I think others have had similar schemes in place at one time or another. In Ian Broadfoot's first book, there is reference to a scheme I tried to start many years ago which was dubbed "Pay a Player" scheme. The general idea was to fund additional budget for Steve Paterson through supporter direct debits each month that went straight to the club, and to the manager's budget in a transparent fashion. This was at a time when we were in serious danger of bankruptcy due to stadium building costs and other debts. I got great feedback from everyone concerned, fans and club alike, I got accosted for more info almost every night I was out, but when it came to filling out those DD forms ... a lot less success. The scheme never officially got started in the end as while we were trying to make sure there would be transparency and SP would get the funds directly, David Sutherland came along and squirrelled away and reorganised all the debt. In a way I am happy it did not take off as I can never be sure if it would have worked spectacularly or have been a cluster**** of epic proportions!  History at this point says I tried to do something, which is preferable to it saying I failed! 

 

From the info supplied, the focus seems to be on buying shares as far as I can see ... but I am not clear from the post above if another aim is to raise a specific amount for the club, potentially on a monthly basis, and have a say in how it is used. The two aims are separate and different, and the waters seem a little muddy in that post. A lack of clear goals is a surefire way for any project to drift from its initial focus and become messy and confusing. Are you saying the aim is to raise £10K per month from fans to buy shares and the club then get that £10K to go to playing budget?  If so, how can you dictate those sorts of terms? It would be more likely to go towards the next hair-brained scheme if no framework for this entire plan was in place. 

 

I also am unclear about what the objectives of this scheme are. Is the aim to raise money by share purchase to help with running costs, or is it to achieve significant shareholding in the hope of having a fan director on the board? Or a bit of both? In the case of the former, I fear that any cash input raised from fans would barely scratch the surface given the scale of recent losses - £16,000 a week according to the most recently available figures and the word on the street has been that the figures for 2022-23, which have to be revealed by the end of next month, may sit at average weekly losses of around £12K, although I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised on that one. As for getting a supporter on the board, I haven’t had time to look at the articles of association, but I suspect that there may be two possible routes - election at the AGM (which should happen before late July) to fill any vacancy, or cooption by the current board. I don’t think straightforward shareholding is enough.

I also wonder if football sometimes loses sight of what a company’s board is meant to be. The orthodox answer is a collection of what the shareholders consider to be the best available group to run the company. But since football operates via the economics of the madhouse, boards tend here to have a significant presence of people who have been prepared to cover a club’s fundamental losses which are built up as a result of persistently paying players more than the market will stand. We therefore encounter the question - are football directors there for their skills in running companies or is their primary role simply as cash cows? The Chairman with the minimum £250 shareholding that Scotty mentioned will be Ken Mackie who, as I understood it, was a Tulloch appointee at a time when Tulloch’s £5 million injection was in full flow, but David Sutherland himself wanted to stand down. Ken, a chartered accountant, was one of the best chairmen, if not the very best that the club has had and, for instance, it was largely due to him that the club negotiated the minefield designed to keep ICT out of the SPL in 2004.

2 hours ago, STFU said:

What's the maths, and how much needs to be raised to achieve to goal?

The company currently has £4.9 million issued shares so it depends what percentage of that would be needed for it to be thought fit for a supporters’ director to be appointed. On that basis, I think the 10% Supporters’ Trust entitlement would put it in third place behind the approx 20% if you aggregate the holdings of the Muirfield Mills group and the 14.9% of the Community Trust, with the likes of Alan Savage/Orion and the Sutherland interest probably next in line along with the McGilvrays. However I don’t think there’s a specified number of shares. As far as I know, board composition is matter force current board and shareholders, in accordance with whatever it says on the Articles of Association.

46 minutes ago, DoofersDad said:

I would be intrigued to know exactly what motivated Ferguson to take the job.  I agree with IHE that he has been up against it from the off - so why take the job on?  O.K. he would be looking for a position where he would have the potential to get some success at a lower level and improve his managerial credentials, but what made him think the ICT job was it?  It seemed pretty clear that when he first arrived here, he knew precious little about the club and the Scottish Championship more generally, so I can only assume that he was tempted by promises of significant resources for new players on the back of the Battery project which, he would have been told, was a certainty to go through.  Keeping us up this year and then challenging hard for promotion the following 2 seasons would be something which would raise his stock.  He'll be all too well aware now that things at the club are not quite what he was led to believe when he signed his contract.

Obviously it is rubbish when he says the team were "brilliant".  He knows and we all know that it's nonsense, but I would prefer that to him publicly slagging the team off.  Do we really want him to behave like Derek Adams?  I'm far from convinced about his style of play and his tactics, but I do have a bit of sympathy for him.  Other teams have been able to strengthen their squads in the January window.  We did not have that luxury and added to that, we have been hard hit with injuries.  We have one of the poorest squads in the club's history and that is not Ferguson's fault.  I think the guys on the pitch are putting in a good shift and doing the best they can for the manager.  I am sure we would be isolated with Arbroath at the bottom if Dodds was still here.

Dig Dunc may not be the greatest of managers and the squad may not be as good as we would like, but they are not the ones who are responsible for the mess the club is in.  If we are to avoid relegation we need to put a good string of results.  To achieve that the guys on the pitch need the fans to get behind them and give support rather than criticism.  Let's support the team and point the finger of blame to where it rightly belongs.

According to what Scot Gardiner told the September Football Memories meeting, it was his idea to approach Duncan Ferguson and it was he who persuaded Duncan Ferguson to apply.

I follow separately that, after the interviews, Scot Gardiner and the Chairman voted for DF and Grassa voted for Dougie Imrie.

2 hours ago, Scotty said:

Sorry IHE, cant agree. I am sure there are lots of nuances, and blame for things can be spread around in multiple directions past and present, but the sad reality is that our club is in the worst situation it has ever been in. 

In the first 10 years or so we trended upwards, so-called "punching above our weight for a club of our size", reaching the Premiership almost in line with the timescale in the 10-year plan outlined by Dougie McGillvray and followed through by others who came along after him. In the next 10 we continued to trend mostly upwards with the odd blip as we reached our highest ever league position, won the cup, and qualified for Europe. Now we find ourselves literally falling off the edge of a cliff and headed for the third tier in the 9 years that have followed those highs. I hope we reach 30 but there has to be some serious doubt about that. If we go down, I don't see how we come back.   

DF may be a club man, and a legend to Evertonians or indeed to Tannadice and perhaps even Ibrox dwellers for his "fighting spirit" but there seems little of that in evidence at ICT recently. He inherited a shambles, tried to fix it with the aforementioned cheap loanees as the budget doesn't allow anything else, and its not working. Anyone earning a wage has been shipped out permanently or on loan and there is little to no team spirit that can create that "Dunkirk Spirit" you talk about. The buck for that stops with the manager even if the situation is not entirely of his own making. 

Off the field, it is impossible to like what we see there either. We seem arrogant and entitled in the extreme when it comes to dealing with everything, from fans to football, especially the concert debacle and, whether you support it or not, also the battery farm. We have done that debate to death, but the concert really hurt our reputation in the local business community. Trust is something you earn and we well and truly burnt that particular bridge regardless of who or what entity legally owned the concert company. As for the battery farm, it seems naive that we would slap our name on it, let ILI try to do the legwork and assume it would be passed simply because it had the ICT name. I can't criticise the club for trying to generate income streams or look for ways to supplement dwindling matchday revenues which have almost always fallen short of breaking even or making a profit unless we had an extended cup run, but we seem to lurch from one hair-brained eggs-in-one-basket scheme to another these days. The buck for that stops with the person in charge of the day to day running of ICT and that would be our CEO.

The board do not get a pass either, but I do have to give them credit for constantly dipping into their pockets to keep us afloat ... none of us could do that, and in the absence of a sugar daddy like Uncle Roy, we do have to give them some credit for putting finances into the club. It would be easy to walk away if they didn't care. Perhaps someone there cares enough to do some straight talking to all these points and try to revive the #TogetherNess that we once felt in the ICT family. 

 

          

That’s a masterful appraisal of the club’s status from Scotty there, although I do also agree with Johndo’s point that Duncan has been hamstrung by a very low budget.

In that regard, I don’t think we know how good a job Duncan is capable of in the same way as we don’t know how good a dentist is if all they have to work with are hammer and chisel. Fundamentally, we have no way of finding out just how desperately low the player budget is and therefore whether we are having to rely on players who would struggle to get a full time contract anywhere else and loanees whose parent clubs have possibly been quite glad to get rid of them. Note that I am simply saying we don’t know here, because we have no way of even guessing how much is being spent on the squad - partly because the latest available accounts reflect a period that ended almost two years ago and also that they are not obliged to show earnings or expenditure, but simply the profit/loss situation (most recently a loss of £835K). All we therefore know is that we have a squad that isn’t performing but we don’t know whether we are simply getting what we have paid for and that neither Dodds nor Ferguson could be expected to make bricks without straw.

Moving on to Scotty’s crystal clear appraisal of the club’s status, both historical and current, we need to come to terms with the fact that the club has been bailed out by well wishers for years now. For instance 2018/19 alone needed £1 million in new shares - ie financial gifts - and since then hands regularly been put into pockets. What makes this all the more egregious is that TWO YEARS of trying to raise cash by non-football means have been utterly wasted since one bright idea went bust and the other has hit serious trouble which was apparently not foreseen. Scotty also makes the point that the club’s local reputation has been substantially trashed as a result of these twin disasters. I would add that I felt distinctly ashamed at the last AGM when I pressed the top table on the failure of the Concert Company and received the almost triumphant reply that the football club had extracted money for stadium hire from the concert company BEFORE it went bust, leaving several local traders out of pocket. Add that to the bellicose and arguably coercive pronouncements emanating from the club during the recent planning process and I really do worry about local public perception of this club and hence willingness to support it should it run into even more serious trouble.

As a veteran of the crisis of 1999-2000 when Tullochs had to intervene to spirit away £2.3 million of debt and before that of a multitude of existential cliffhangers during the merger, I am still finding it difficult to see how the club can escape from this one, especially in a local atmosphere where a body that should enjoy widespread esteem has got itself into a position where it is actively disliked in many quarters.

48 minutes ago, caley1 said:

Ferguson was a big name ( nice guy ) but Not a manager . Yet Another Scot Gardiner disaster as his recommendation . And man has he had a few .  Everything this guy has anything to do with the club is a disaster and about time he is shown the door .

Club is in a very precarious position financially so why are we still paying this clown ? ( Reportedly well over 90k a year when we should immediately have been looking to save money ?   Far too many loan players ,It rarely  works and clearly hasn’t worked . I’d have Charlie take the last few games with some fresh ideas as obviously Ferguson is way out of his depth . 

It should maybe be added that Duncan Ferguson must be working on a rock bottom budget and up here it does seem that clubs have to pay players a premium for geographical reasons recruiting at a decent standard must be very difficult.

Was anyone else at the September meeting of the Football Memories group where Scot Gardiner took the floor and detailed how he personally had recruited Duncan? I understand that the appointment was confirmed after Scot Gardiner and the Chairman voted for Duncan and Grassa voted for Dougie Imrie.

3 hours ago, Yngwie said:

No, income has dropped. Prize money and gate receipts massively down since the Premiership days.

Certain running costs have increased with energy being one of them, and Big Dunc won’t be cheap, but look at the current squad and compare it with the one we had even in our relegation season. We are certainly not spending more than we did in the Premiership.

One of the problems of being a “Small Company” is that the accounts aren’t very detailed. In fact when they eventually materialised last year, I don’t recollect any statement of turnover so we don’t really know, year on year, what’s happening with earnings. We also don’t know what the losses are as a percentage of turnover so we just have to speculate as to what the relative magnitude of that £835K loss was.

2 hours ago, STFU said:

Our financial position and the future of the club is a situation of the boards making.  Living beyond our means to an extent that they are no longer willing to fund and now trying to hold the city to ransom over planning that will allow them to get that money back.

Crying over fans not turning up in sufficient numbers when they're serving up a **** poor product at an ever increasing price.

All sense of community and belonging stripped from the club, and any who dare protest being shown the door.

If that's the cost of allowing the club to be run the way it is by those currently on the board, I don't want them there.

It might not be so sad if we were seeing even a glimpse of success, but if people such as yourself are happy for the club's soul to be sold in return for a pitiful existence, then have at it.  The longer it continues, the fewer who'll be around to pick up the pieces when needed.

I agree with a certain amount of what you say but there are other criticisms that were also made of the previous board and also of boards before that, and indeed are made by football fans throughout the game. The basic truth is that there is no obligation on anyone to put themselves in the firing line and spend their personal funds running a fundamentally non-viable business using a fundamentally non-viable business model - which is common throughout the game. It’s been clear from the start that there isn’t enough demand, neither actual nor (probably) potential, for a product involving around 30 full time front line employees with several more in backup roles, to make that business anything other than regularly loss making. Over time, something in the ballpark of £10 million of other people’s money has gone into keeping this business going and it always runs into the same problem because of its fundamentally loss making nature. Far too often in football there seems to be this expectation that it’s someone else’s responsibility to fund this loss making process and failure then leads to calls for the removal of those who have used their own money to try and their replacement by others prepared to expose themselves to the same routine.

11 hours ago, STFU said:

Unsecured loans, so they can shout all they want for the money, if we don't have it they can't get it.

High chance we're facing administration anyway, so they'd get nothing back then either.

I'd rather cut the cancer and take a chance on recovery than continue to let it slowly kill us.

And if you did that - cast aside people who have been bailing out a fundamentally loss making position with their own money for years - who would you expect to take over the running of the club and to cover its ongoing financial shortcomings, knowing that this could happen to them as well? The community doesn’t owe football a living - especially if football chooses to live beyond its means and expects other people to pick up the tab for that.

11 hours ago, CaleyCiuin said:

Great away day today. The young lads down the front were very vocal………… Sack The Board and Gardiner out were the main chants. A bridge & Castle for full effect was also flung in ,  Love it…….. but why only away days  ??????  Do you think SG and any board members were at the game, if so they surely heard it. 

Has anyone chanting for the Board to be sacked managed to work out how much in loans would be recalled for immediate repayment as a result?

16 hours ago, Leaky Blinder said:

Clearly Dens Park is not a designated green belt zone I wonder if Scot Gardiner ever touted a battery farm there

It would probably sink into the deep mud that was clearly afflicting the penalty spot there yesterday morning.

49 minutes ago, ictbob said:

Skimming through this so don't know if this has been asked already but have council explained why only 5 turned up for the original vote but when the sh!# hits the fan over 50 of them stroll in. Is this not there job to look at these things and be there to vote if they have an opinion? Doesn't sound like there doing there jobs correctly!

The original decision was taken by the South Planning Committee comprising councillors from south of the Kessock Bridge. Some of these failed to attend the site visit so were disqualified, some declared an interest and it’s said some couldn’t be @rsed, leaving 5 as against a quorum of 3.

The decision was then referred to the full council, also including members from 100+ miles away from Inverness and that attracted an attendance of 56, with no apparent concern about declaring interests or not having done a site visit.

25 minutes ago, Douglas Mackenzie said:

Highland Council were happy for five of them (Councillors) to make a decision on this one,until three of the five voted in 'favour' and went off script. This was deemed a bad look. Then they scrambled about,broke a few rules and arranged the vote to go to the full Council. At this meeting we have the laughing show piece of Councillor MacPherson versus the Convener,three Councilors abstain,six cannot take part because of their interests ,or what they previously said or discussed on the issue,23 voted for and 30 against and this is deemed a good look. They are a laughing stock and it shows us all that when you put a group of unqualified people in a room and ask them to make key decisions on our future and that of the community,anything can happen. This is a classic example of you get what you voted for. Just a pit more people would not show an interest in local elections and vote for people that can do the job.

In this case we have an area of 2% of the land available,which I understand is waste ground that could be turned into something thatwould generate income for ITC,but as important all the community work they do.In fact it would allow them to enhance all that and better serve the community at large in many ways. Unfortunately I guess politics came into play and blinded the views of some of these Councillors who were unable to open their eyes to the bigger picture.

As for the club,  credit where it is due for pursuing this idea, just a pity that they had to come up against the great and good of HIghland Council.

In 1995 Inverness District Council voted for a £900,000 grant to the club, of existential significance, to make the stadium project viable. On the strength of that, construction contracts were let - and then a cabal of councillors and council officials managed to find a technicality which they used to create a rearguard action against payment. The eventual outcome of a chaotic scenario was that, under threat of legal action, the cash was paid from the Common Good Fund.

Fast forward to 2024 and Highland Council’s planning process made a decision to allow a battery farm, again of existential significance, worth £3.4 million to the club, but now another huge spanner has been thrown in these works in the form of another rearguard action by councillors (and possibly council officials as well) who don’t like this decision and are again intent on reversing it amid rumblings of legal action. Our local councils don’t seem to learn much from previous episodes of chaos that they’ve created.

1 hour ago, hislopsoffsideagain said:

So the folk who actually own a significant chunk of the club are the same old names from the good old days - Sutherland, McGilvray, Savage, the Muirfield Mills folk. Should they be either sticking their heads above the parapet or forcing change behind the scenes, before it all goes completely to hell?

I think what the breakdown shows is that the ownership of the club is extremely diffuse, with no single group holding an especially large holding. The biggest is clearly the Muirfield Mills syndicate where a block of around half a dozen people own around 900K shares but even that is less than 20%, with the Trust block coming in at less than 15% and the Savage, McGilvray and Sutherland holdings all less than 10%. I’m also not sure what the personal relations are like among these biggest players. It’s also worth noting that those involved are almost all over 70 years old and may not be in a position or have the inclination to do much.

2 hours ago, hislopsoffsideagain said:

 

From the last info available on Companies House, I believe these are the people/groups with 50,000 shares or more:

	No. shares
Inverness Caledonian Thistle Trust Limited	729500
Caledonian Football Club	600000
Graham Rae	382400		Former Chairman (Muirfield Mills)
Inverness Thistle Football Club	300000
Orion Engineering Services Limited	275189		(Alan Savage - Former Director)
Dugald McGilvray	275167		Former Chairman
Iain McGilvray	191816
Orion Group UK Limited	191317		(Alan Savage - Former Director)
David Cameron	175000		Director
Roderick Ross	170000		Club President
Richard Hillier	164900		(Muirfield Mills)
Russell Cameron	102150		(Muirfield Mills)
Dornoch Developments Ltd	100000		(Directors include Caroline Clayton, George Fraser, David Sutherland)
Paul MacInnes	89150		(Muirfield Mills)
Alan McPhee	77150		Former Director (Muirfield Mills)
Emeric Innes	57750		(Muirfield Mills)
George Fraser	51600		Former Director
David Sutherland	50250		Former Director
Gordon Allan Munro	50000		Director
Caroline Clayton	50000
Anne Sutherland	50000
Catriona Ramsay	50000

Thanks for doing that very interesting leg work at Companies House, hislop.

It’s also possible to group the holdings you list into the various “interest groups” that have been involved with the club over the last 25 years or so. I believe the still quite fragmented breakdown is as follows -

David Sutherland, family and Dornoch Investments - 300,250.

McGilvray Family - 466,983. (Includes some more of what Sandy Catto donated to the Hospice and which I believe Sandy originally bought from Ian Fraser who invested over £300K in the 1996 share issue)

Alan Savage/Orion - 466,506 (See note above)

Muirfield Mills - 873,500 (I believe that at least one other MM investment of less than £50K would take this above 900,000.)

ICT Charitable Trust - 729,500. This is Tulloch’s holding which was donated to the Trust.

The Thistle FC and the Caledonian FC blocks are “A” shares while the others are ordinary shares. I’m not sure what the voting arrangements are there or, if they have voting rights, who would exercise these. EDIT - while I was writing, Highland Exile made a post that reminded me of the A share arrangement. Thanks HE!)
Note that David Cameron, Roddy Ross and Gordon Munro also have £50K+ Ordinary holdings and will also doubtless have internal political alignments.

Many of these shares were bought to keep the wolf from the door - most notably the large Muirfield Mills conglomerate which is money that’s long gone covering losses. I’m also not sure how much is outstanding in loans that may have been made, but with no shares in return, and are still outstanding.

3 hours ago, IMMORTAL HOWDEN ENDER said:

Am I being overly optimistic but surely there must be a back up plan in the event of what has actually happened. I would also suggest that the "investors" have much to lose - reputation and financially wise. ICT is a mere clever but emotionally utilised 'side issue' but perhaps now highly beneficial that WE are cemented in the headlights and headlines. But I still blame the eejits, not in respect of the 'plan' which was evidently built on personal gain, but rather how they executed it.

Unfortunately, in many respects this IS the backup plan…. after the collapse of the Concert Company.

Another thought. What if the Scottish Government overrides today’s decision and gives the scheme the go ahead…. but so much fear and alarm has by now been spread by local residents that house prices in the surrounding area take a nosedive?

10 minutes ago, Fraz said:

No chance this will get passed I assume #greenspace 

https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/news/10-bungalows-planned-on-greenfield-site-near-caledonian-cana-345011/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

As was the massive area at Holm Mills, now circumscribed by the West Link…. and where hundreds of houses are now being built. It would have been an ideal site for a public park.

5 minutes ago, wilsywilsy said:

I'm not sure I would go that far and say it's scaremongering. There were some reasonable concerns highlighted today about fire safety and the environment that was all under lined by the lack of legislation that could offer any comfort. At least petrol stations have tight regulations and controls from HSE and other regulatory bodies that planners and councils can lean in to.

I think that the club’s prospects of acceptance were on a dicky wicket once safety issues came into the equation. It’s easy to argue between the loss of 2% of a large green area by taking the Inner Moray Firth plan as the letter of the law on the one hand, and on the other a green initiative that will yield £125K per annum for the Council and hugely help one of Inverness’s highest profile organisations. However Elfin Safety seems to trump everything.

Also, it’s easy for people in our position to highlight the benefit to the club but the ordinary person on the street or councillor in the chamber often has no partisan interest and could validly argue (Devil’s Advocate kite alert!) that the self-inflicted financial failings of a football club, notwithstanding its good PR etc for Inverness, cannot be taken into consideration in the course of deciding a planning application.

Unfortunately this is the second non-football money making project that has been floated as a panacea, with no potential pitfalls initially flagged up…. until they suddenly emerged from left field.

There was no indication that the Concert Company could encounter any difficulties…. until it went bust at great cost to the club’s local reputation. And now there’s the Battery Farm that suddenly ran into planning difficulties and we are where we are now.

One of my concerns is that very little was revealed about the BF until the club meeting held the other week in response to the sudden public emergence of planning issues. Now that we know what the planning issues were - and irrespective of anyone’s viewpoint on them - was it not clear from the start that this was a project that could attract planning concerns, so at least came with some uncertainties? And if so why were we told so little about this project until a very late stage?

So now… around two years on from the birth of the Concert Company… the club’s financial security continues to proceed ever deeper into a black hole.

On 3/10/2024 at 10:41 AM, old caley girl said:

If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd wonder why the Council parking attendants made an appearance yesterday? 

They appeared also to be aware that there were potentially rich pickings from a large crowd at the Half Marathon and were booking people there - including, apparently, in the Archive Centre car park.

5 hours ago, CELTIC1CALEY3 said:

Here is the conclusion that members were presented with at the South Planning Committee before approving it;

CONCLUSION 5.1 Following the submission of additional information both the Council’s Environmental Health Officer and Ecology Officer have removed their respective objection and subsequently reasons for refusal 2 and 3 are no longer relevant. 5.2 Nevertheless, it is not considered that the submission has adequately justified the loss of designated open space as a result of industrial development and therefore the proposal’s impact on designated open space remains as assessed in the Report considered by the South Planning Applications Committee at its meeting on 22 November 2023. The recommendation is to refuse the application on the grounds of the impact on the open space. 6. IMPLICATIONS 6.1 Resource: Not applicable 6.2 Legal: Not applicable 6.3 Community (Equality, Poverty and Rural): Not applicable 6.4 Climate Change/Carbon Clever: Not applicable 6.5 Risk: Not applicable 6.6 Gaelic: Not applicable 7.

RECOMMENDATION Action required before decision issued Notification to Scottish Ministers N Conclusion of Section 75 Obligation N 44 Revocation of previous permission N Subject to the above actions, it is recommended to REFUSE the application for the following reason: 1. The proposal is contrary to National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) Policy 20 a), and Highland-wide Local Development Plan Policy 75 by virtue that it has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that the Open Space is not fit for purpose, nor has substitute provision has been offered to meet the needs of the local area, nor is it considered that the proposal for the development of the Open Space would significantly contribute to the spatial strategy for the area, which aims to: ‘concentrate development on existing settlements, create sustainable new communities, provide the infrastructure and transport network required to support these communities whilst ensuring the area’s most valuable built and natural assets are protected.’ Consequently it is not considered that the threshold of maintaining the overall integrity of the Open Space network is achieved.

The Notice of Amendment being considered by the full Council this Thursday is to review the decision.  That would suggest the issue is solely about 'the integrity of the Open Space network' . If members were misinformed, there was a mistake in law, or new material information has come to light could justify a review.  On the basis that the review is purely about the integrity of the Open Space - the Council's agenda does not clarify this - then I would expect all Councillors able to address the review are taken for a site visit prior to the meeting, as were the Planning Committee members. 

The current decision of the Committee in the draft minute is as follows:

Amendment: Mrs I MacKenzie, seconded by Mr R Jones to approve the application because, while it was acknowledged that the development would result in a loss of open space, the development would encourage, 44 promote, and facilitate renewable energy storage and so would comply with policy 11 of NPF4. It was considered that the benefits gained under policy 11 of NPF4 outweighed the loss of open space and therefore the application should be granted, with powers delegated to officers in consultation with the Chair and members who had participated in the decision to develop the appropriate conditions.

 https://www.highland.gov.uk/meetings/meeting/4950/highland_council/attachment/83016

Is an English translation of this available? I’ve lost my Gibberish - English Dictionary.

30 minutes ago, Satan said:

That's an argument for a city council , which is for another day.

For another day indeed - but it’s still one that needs to be had at some point.

2 hours ago, RiG said:

Yeah that final paragraph is an embarrassing inclusion. Suspect someone bundled that on at the end but it's not overly helpful. The rest of it is a bit better in that it at least focuses on planning matters rather than petty point scoring. 

I think that the club also needs to remember that this debate/campaign is being held in a very public arena, so overly aggressive communications with Councillors are also being seen by the whole community, and this is bound also to influence the perception of the club by that public. Here we also have to consider that public perception of ICT took a considerable knock after the collapse of the concert company and I fear that further damage could be done here. It’s unfortunate that the dire finances also exclude the employment of some advice on PR.