Got an idea.....................

[Alex MacLeod]

...................................and my tongues firmly in my cheek :tic01:

We take over Grant St. Demolish the Merkinch flats. We build a super wee stadium and training facilities and we let Clach stay provided they play their games at 12:00 on a saturday.

THE STORY IS HERE

Seriously though, its sad when things come to this. Fault with the board somewhere along the way. Three years of arrears is just stupidity considering the council baled them out already

[Johnboy]

We take over Grant St. Demolish the Merkinch flats. We build a super wee stadium and training facilities and we let Clach stay provided they play their games at 12:00 on a saturday.

Or we could play there ourselves, and let them play out at our tip... :023:

[SMEE]

Seriously though, its sad when things come to this. Fault with the board somewhere along the way. Three years of arrears is just stupidity considering the council baled them out already

Havent they had a number of lifelines thrown their way over last 10 yrs? Didnt ICT bale them out aswell yrs back?

[SMEE]

So...its the Common Good Fund that owns Clach Park. They should sell it and have more fireworks  :021::blah01:

[SMEE]

Serioulsy tho........should the club be baled out yet again? The saying frying pans and fire springs to mind here. If it was a business, it would probably be forced to close

[Charles Bannerman]

Serioulsy tho........should the club be baled out yet again? The saying frying pans and fire springs to mind here. If it was a business, it would probably be forced to close

So you weren't around 1995-2001 when ICT had to depend hugely on input from the CGF and from Tullochs in order to survive? Do you not know how close to the wire ICT was around 2000 with over ?2M of debt?  Clach's debts are trifling compared with ICT's, except that ICT has been fortunate enough for these to be taken away by the Trust.

What the Courier story doesn't mention is David Dowling's plan to try to get a revenue raising community all weather pitch at Grant Street.

It's also interesting to compare two broadly similar inputs from the CGF.... ?280,000 to buy Grant Street in 1997 and ?250,000 to fund the closing of Highland 2007. The former investment purchased an appreciating asset, attracts a rerntal of ?14,000 a year and has kept a vital part of the Inverness heritage alive. The latter investment......

[tm4tj]

..............went up in smoke. :029:

[SMEE]

I dont recall ICT getting bailed out by CGF to any great degree (thats not to say it hasnt happened!). As far as Tullochs or any other business's financial input to ICT....thats simply because there was something in it for them!

At the end of the day, if a Tullochs type comes along and ploughs cash into Clach....fair enuff, but methinks its a matter of time till they are in same situation again.

Point being....maybe Clach are in the position they are coz simply not enuff people are intrested when all is said and done. If thats the case....maybe its time to call it a day!

[clacher_holiday2]

If Tullochs bought Grant Street then you can be sure theyd be building houses on it eventually, which would be fair enough I guess.  Clach would have to move to the Carse or the Bucht.

I think they will be saved this time, I also think it will definitely be a last chance for them, Fort William exist on 100 fans a week so I cant see why Clach couldnt.

[SMEE]

I agree Clacher....i think they will be saved yet again...but how many times can this happen? I have a soft spot for Clach, even toyed with going to lend some support (but not sure i could handle the drop in standard)

[Scotty]

Charles - I hear what you say, and none of us can deny that ICT were in bad financial shape before the Trust was formed and money was given out. However, there are a lot of differences.

ICTs debt, whilst in part perhaps accumulated through bad practices, was also attributable to the astronomical costs above and beyond what they were ever given to help develop that part of the Longman. The council might never have got that money back directly, but they have profited handsomely from the infrastructure that ICT had to put in place at great cost.

Secondly - after reaching the brink and being saved, ICT have cut their cloth accordingly. Year on year I believe we also pay a similar "token" rent to the Trust for the use of the stadium and we dont default on that. We have no debt other than a 20K interest free loan recorded in the accounts (which we should pay back ASAP so we are truly debt free). It would seem that we came to the brink, got saved, and learned our lesson whereas Clach got saved by the Council as well as ICT/Sutherland and now find themselves in a similar situation just a few short years later with no lessons learned.

I dont know what the answer is for Clach, and I wouldnt really like to see Grant Street Park demolished to make way for houses but they have to help themselves as well. If they could raise 10K a year for rent through merchandising/donations etc and had only 4K debts for rent then maybe the council could come up with a scheme where they use the stadium in some sort of community capacity or reduce the rent level but if they are simply not bothering to pay the rent then like any other council debtor the bailiffs might have to come in.

[L_G]

Clach have their annual fundraising dinner coming up on Friday 7th March.  If it is well supported they could raise ?14,000 on this night alone.  I know that their players only receive a token amount for their services, and I think that the social club is leased out at the moment, but there must be some scope somewhere for improvement.  I do think the board have to take a look at things very urgently.  They must have agreed the cost of the rent, so the board should be budgeting accordingly.  I would hate to see Clach disappear from the face of the earth, so I hope they get it sorted soon.

[Proctor]

Afew mates have had birthday parties in the social club plus they have that deviation thing there so its getting used. It could be argued that it is a vital part of the local community.

[SMEE]

Being a vital part of the community doesnt mean you dont have to pay your rent tho.

[L_G]

Afew mates have had birthday parties in the social club plus they have that deviation thing there so its getting used. It could be argued that it is a vital part of the local community.

You are right Proctor, but as I said I think that the social club is leased or at least managed by somebody, so the football club doesn't really benefit from these events.

[SMEE]

My understanding was that it was the Clach Club in name only. It was now a seperate entity from the Footbal Club

[chris123]

You can take the Clach out of Merkinch, but you can't take the Merkinch out of Clach.

Or something along those lines.

[Guest Calum-Red-an-Blue]

Currently i am playing in the youth development in clach and it is a great set up, they give many of us a chance of acheiving something rather than in the caley yt where the chances of going all the way to u19's is very slim ( especially if they keep bying youth :029: ) my point is that if clach were to disapeer then so much local talent would be wasted, as there is not really going to be a team in which you can play a good standard of football against others in scotland. Football in inverness would have very little representation. it needs to be sorted otherwise our area will only have one team when it originally had 3  not so long ago. :symbol_exclaim01:

[SMEE]

Unfortunately Calum....the youth set up at Clach is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. It not going to count for anything should things not improve on the rent front

[Charles Bannerman]

I dont recall ICT getting bailed out by CGF to any great degree

You're obviously not aware of the ?900,000 which Caley Thistle, after a lengthy wrangle within the District Council, got from the CGF in 1996. Without that the stadium project could not have gone ahead and it's very likely that the club would have been strangled at birth.

Scotty.. I think you have to distinguish between the money given to ICT for the stadium (a total of ?1.8M of public cash) and the debts of over ?2M which were run up subsequently (mainly 1997-2000) as a result of overspending. These debts still exist - it's just that they have been "spirited away" (and I've never been able to pin David Sutherland down on exactly how) by the ICT Trust.

I'm not so sure it's a case of "no lessons learned" with Clach. There's a major difference between ICT and Clach in that since 2001 ICT has been able to be fundamentally financially viable, ROUGHLY breaking even. However Clach is fundamentally financially non viable (indeed I feel another book coming on about social and economic conditions in the Merkinch) so continues to be loss making irrespective of tightly they cut their cloth.

But one additional factor will be emerging over the next week or so and that is the community all weather pitch which they are attempting to put at Grant Street which could become a substantial source of income.

This was revealed exclusively to the BBC on Friday afternoon (sorry... do I sound like Chic?! :014:) and we will be going with it in more depth on Monday morning, including an interview with David Dowling.

Clach's rent, by the way, is ?14K - 5% of what the CGF paid ICT Properties for the park. In comparison, the land housing Spartans' ground is believed to be worth something like ?8M and they pay Edinburgh City Council ?350 a year.

[SMEE]

You're obviously not aware of the ?900,000 which Caley Thistle, after a lengthy wrangle within the District Council, got from the CGF in 1996.

Actually, I am VERY aware of that ?900k. I actually thought there was some other sum of money I had maybe missed to which you reffered. That ?900k was a loan was it not? And on top of that....ICT opened up that whole peice of land for the council to reap the benefits so it was genuinely in the Councils intrest to invest that sum of money.

It would seem Clach have been taking the p1ss a bit thinking they could get away with it by assuming the CGF were a softer touch than the council would be over non payment of rent!

[CaleyD]

Thankfully the Social Club is a separate entity form the club as they were at one point juggling a debt of around ?250,000 and proving even less viable than the club.  In fact, the debt of the Social Club may have been part of the reason it was hived off as a separate entity and I'm not certain that things have improved any.

As disappointing as it is to see them unable to balance the books I do think they are an important part of Inverness and not just Merkinch and for that reason alone it would not upset me in the slightest to see public money being used to sustain their existence.  It would also not upset me in the slightest if we were to see them absorbed into the ICT setup or even the Highland Football Academy setup with us absorbing the cost of the conversion to an all weather surface which could be used for training, if not by the first team squad, then certainly by some of the younger groups.

[SMEE]

it would not upset me in the slightest to see public money being used to sustain their existence.

Thing is tho CaleyD......how long before they get into the same mess again? There is no incentive to run the club correctly if they know they will continually get bailed out by the good will of the powers that be. How many times does this scenario have to occur before its decided enuff is enuff?

[Yngwie]

Do other Highland league clubs not balance the books, and even make the occasional surplus, with smaller crowds than Clach? Is it just that those clubs own their grounds and don't have a rent bill, or are there other differences?

[Action Man]

Would it be feasable for ICT to absorb Clach as a feeder club / training facility / youth development initiative. With the experience ICT has gained over the years, and with good financial management, this could be good for both clubs, benefitting both. Just a thought, but it would be a sad day for Inverness not to have representation in the Highland league.