DoofersDad

That's a good question but I don't know the answer. It was one of the issues with the original vote. Certainly shareholders and season ticket holders were seen as having an interest. One would hope that all councillors representing Inverness wards would consider themselves as supporters of the City's largest football club even if only on the basis of the fact that it brings revenue into the area. It would be a complete nonsense to disqualify councillors from voting just because they are supporters. Indeed given the nature of the football club, even being a shareholder is not really a relevant issue as there will never be any financial return on the "investment". Support for other clubs should not be an issue as it is often argued (but not by Charles) that having 2 senior teams in the area provides healthy competition. It seems that certain people in the Council want to prevent local Inverness Councillors from voting and then, in the next breath, complain that the lack of local Inverness councillors voting invalidates the vote! ICT V Highland Council. The winner will be the one that scores the fewest own goals.

Which other people on their Community Council and 3 other Community Councils have signed up to and put those forward as representatives of the Communities they serve. There are several democratically elected representatives who need to be able to justify their actions to the electorates they represent.

I'll be heading down too. I'm not going with much enthusiasm or expectation, but you have to endure the grim times to fully appreciate the successes when they come.

It was the planning department that recommended rejection on that one point Yngwie refers to, and the planning committee which decided to reject the recommendation and approve the application. Now that the Council have decided that all councillors with planning training and no disqualifying interest should make the decision, it is open to them to reject the application on any issue they consider relevant. For instance, the Community Councils state: " The BESS site guidelines from the National Fire Chiefs’ Council make it irrefutably clear that this steep site and planning application for an industrial chemical energy storage site has multiple unresolvable safety issues." That is strong stuff. But the club's statement states: "Fire risk etc is not a material planning consideration." and "The Head of Protection and Preparedness for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service confirmed they had no issues with this application." These positions are polar opposites. If I were a Councillor charged with being part of the decision making group, I would want clarification here. One assumes the Council has received formal professional advice and that this provides detailed reasons why the potential risks identified in the NFCC's guidelines are not such as to warrant rejection of this application. If I was a Community Councillor I would also wish to see the local advice and a site risk assessment before signing up to such an uncompromising statement saying that the site has "multiple unresolvable safety issues". I don't know what professional advice has been given. What I do know is that there are people on one side or the argument or other and maybe, both, who are making strong statements either with no evidence to back them up, or knowingly contradictory to the evidence. I suspect we will hear a good bit more about this before the Council make their final decision.

HT. 0-0 FT. 0-2 ICT. Mckay Opp. Todorov Crowd. 1911

According to the Courier, 4 local Community Councils have issued a statement opposing the application. It strongly contradicts the club’s arguments on a number of points. What an absolute mess this is.

Better late than never. We will now have to wait and see whether it is too late. The earlier pronouncements with their arrogant and bullying tones will not have gone down well with many in the Council and will undoubtedly have harmed the case. This latest communication is a much more measured message from the Chairman. It sticks to the salient points and provides sound arguments for approval which are relevant to the application. For instance, whilst acknowledging that a small amount of green space would be lost, the statement highlights that additional trees and shrubs would be planted with a resultant biodiversity gain. All councillors will now have these arguments and I rather doubt that receiving multiple copies of the same email will make them any more likely to vote in favour. As STFU says, the cards are all dealt. Let's just hope there is not another joker in the pack.

Just been sent. https://ictfc.com/bess-fairways-23-00497-ful-reasons-why-this-application-can-and-should-be-approved/

It's very different from 93/4, but there can be little doubt that confidence in the current regime at the club is low and is getting lower. Whether that lack of confidence morphs into general anger will depend on how the club responds to the outcome of the Council's deliberations - whatever the result. I'm not going to the meeting tonight. I simply don't see the point. Like Yngwie, I am struggling to see why they would hold a meeting if they expected the full Council to approve the scheme. And if they don't expect it to be approved, then how is the meeting going to change anything? By "enlightening" us on the issues, does the Chairman then expect us to lobby councillors in our droves in a last desperate bid to change their minds? If so, then it would have been far more sensible to have done so by emailing shareholders and ST holders and putting relevant detail on social media, in order to facilitate the lobbying. Had this been done at the point of notifying us of the meeting, any lobbying could be in full swing by now. The reasons for refusing the application are now known to the very specific. Presumably the club and its business partners have, in turn, developed very specific responses to those reasons and these will be detailed tonight. But why wait? Why hasn't this been communicated before? To me, this sounds more like a PR exercise designed to "enlighten" us about how hard the Board and the CEO have been working to secure the future of the club and how it will not be their fault if the project is not approved and we lurch into a major financial crisis. It sounds like a desperate attempt to keep the supporters onside with the management of the club. My concern is that it is more likely to have the opposite effect and will also antagonise the Council even more than they have already done. I hope I'm wrong.

Same as last week then. Let’s hope our injury hit squad can keep the run going.

There's your answer, Yngwie. You can close the thread now!

Definitely a draw. Better they get 2 points between them than 3.

The Courier's daily briefing today has a section about the meeting. Below the intro piece is an invitation to "read more here". When you click on that, you get "Sorry, the article you have requested is no longer available". This article presumably contains a bit more than the basic statement which they published yesterday and which is still available on the Courier site. It may mean nothing, it may be a technical glitch or there may have been a reason why they pulled the article. Just seems a bit strange though.

Much as I want our football club to thrive, there are rather more important issues impacting on people's day to day lives which will influence how I vote in the next Council elections.

I guess it's good that the club is communicating with shareholders and the wider fan base, but I am not clear what the meeting is meant to achieve this late on in the process. If my understanding is correct, the application will be discussed by the full Council on 14th March, so presumably this meeting will be seeking to encourage folk to lobby their local councillors. I am sure the club has already lobbied all councillors. Frankly, I rather doubt that anything I might say to any councillor is going to make them change their mind now. I also doubt that there will be anything in the presentation which couldn't be made available in a posted statement and which couldn't have been communicated well before now. The matter is in the hands of the Council, so there is little point in discussion within the club. What the club should be doing is explaining to its shareholders and supporters why it has delayed submitting its annual financial statement and telling us when the AGM is to be held. There are questions that need to be asked of the Board well beyond the narrow confines of "questions related to the battery Farm".

It is a strange league this one. Anything can happen. When we last lost a game (1-0 at home to Queens Park) we actually moved up a place on goal difference to 7th in the league by virtue of Morton thrashing the Pars 5-0 at East End Park. Since then we have gone 4 games unbeaten but have dropped down, not one, but two places to 9th! We are in the relegation play off spot but with a zero goal difference. Potentially we could end up getting relegated with a positive goal difference. We are 7 pts clear of the only team below us but also only 7 pts behind Morton in 4th place and in a promotion play-off place. Don't you just love the play-off system! As I say, anything can happen.

Yup. Up to 4 games now.

Sounds fair enough, but personally I would go for County's stadium - far more atmosphere. I appreciate that parking can be an issue in Dingwall, but we could raze our current stadium and its "temporary" stands to the ground, develop a large car park and operate a park and ride to Dingwall. In that way, one of Gardiner's grand ideas might finally come to fruition.

To be fair, the rot set in before Morrison and Gardiner were in charge. Our high point came with the cup win and coming 3rd in the league in 2015. This was achieved with a bit of help from bigger clubs who had managed to self-destruct, but was also the culmination of a history of good management leading to our best squad ever being pulled together by Terry Butcher. He left us for Hibs, and Hughes capitalised on his inheritance by leading the club to success in the following season. Sadly, it has mostly been downhill since then. Not only was Hughes unable to recruit the quality of players Butcher had, his style of play was, at times, mind numbingly boring. Rather than building on the success of the 2014/5 season, fans started to drift away and the team started to struggle. What Hughes was good at was persuading the Board to give him money to pay players higher wages on longer contracts. Hughes then left at the end of the 2015/6 season and the Board, under Kenny Cameron, made the bizarre decision to appoint Richie Foran as manager on a 4 year contract. Foran did not have the experience or the resources to halt the slide and inevitably, we got relegated. Cameron resigned as chairman with Willy Finlayson taking over on a temporary basis. Foran left within days but apparently with 3 years of his contract still to pay off. John Robertson was appointed manager again and hopes were high that his appointment would see us return to the top flight, but with the financial shackles created by the mismanagement of the previous couple of seasons, it was not to be. Graham Rae took over as Chairman and he appointed Yvonne Crook as CEO. Crook might have had business experience but she knew little about football. She lasted less than a year before being replaced by Gardiner in April 2019. Morrison took over as Chairman soon after that. So, to be fair, the current management team inherited a difficult situation where the club had financial commitments for payments which were producing no benefit to the club. They were also hampered in their efforts by the Covid pandemic. But whilst they inherited a mess and have faced obstacles not of their making, the way they have gone about trying to reinvigorate the club have undoubtedly done more harm than good and have antagonised a lot of people on the way. It's time for a new approach.

HT. 0-0 FT. 1-1 ICT. Samuel Morton. Muirhead Crowd. 1882

If that is the case (and I would imagine it probably is) then it illustrates what a serious financial position the club is now in. Yngwie makes some fair points about applauding the club for trying to find innovative ways of trying to keep the club at a level above what income from tickets sales etc could possibly support. That's fine, but the problem is the club has gone about these issues in an arrogant and often incompetent way. It takes the fans for granted in so many ways and simply ignores the contribution they can make. As a result, it has alienated many of the very people who would otherwise be contributing significantly to the long term future of the club. Regardless of the outcome of the Battery project, the club will continue to struggle as long as those people responsible for this alienation remain in charge. Even if they do make genuine efforts to change their ways, nobody is going to trust them. We need new leadership and we need it soon. We need leadership that embraces the supporters as part of the fabric of the club, perhaps even looking to move towards a fan owned model, but certainly having a supporters' representative on the Board. I don't care if we go part time for a while, or it we drop to Division 1 or even Division 2 if that is what it takes to reset and develop a sustainable business model going forward. I used to feel really proud of our Club, but at times now I almost feel embarrassed to tell people I support ICT. I want to feel the pride again, but that is not going to happen whilst the current regime are in charge.

Are you sure? There's nothing on the club's website to say they've done this!

If they always leave a gap of 15 months between AGMs, they cease to be AGMs. It would be 4 AGMs in 5 years. My understanding is that the requirement in the Articles of Association to have an AGM means that there should be an AGM held in each financial year, i.e, between 1st June and 31st May. The 15 month rule would therefore only come into play if the previous AGM had been held before the end of February last year - which it wasn't. I think it needs to be held by the end of May in order to comply with the Articles of Association.

But have they been told that's the way it's supposed to work?

I would have taken a draw before the game, but Dunfermline were poorer than expected and what with the other results, I am now really disappointed. We started brightly and to be fair, there was good commitment, throughout the team till the final whistle. When Dunfermline pressed us in midfield we often played some pretty neat stuff to keep possession under pressure. The trouble is, we created next to nothing and there is a worrying lack of inventiveness. Even when there is a shooting opportunity they pass rather than have a pop. We have to take a few more risks up-front. Billy has a poor record of taking penalties. Credit to him for standing up and taking responsibility but surely we must have others in the side who can hit the ball harder and closer to side of the goal. Highlight was Devine's brilliant block on the line. Superb! And whilst we on the positives, that result extends our unbeaten run to 3 games.