COLIN CAMPBELL: After Inverness Gathering Place debacle, Academy Street is another costly lesson
Maybe every group of Highland councillors is destined to have one complete and utter shambles slipping and sliding like a cube of mercury through clumsy, flailing hands.
For the last council it was the debacle of the Ness riverside Gathering Place.
For those elected to form its successor it’s the Academy Street fiasco.
Is one worse than the other? Or are they both equally as bad?
The council's Gathering Place enthusiasts spent three years arguing in the face of mass public opposition the merits of tearing up an unspoilt and beautiful stretch of riverside and building a curved concrete wall there. This structure, in defiance of sanity, they deemed to be "artwork". The total cost of construction was around £300,000. The wretched saga tarnished the reputations of many and probably led to the departure of some, who did not stand for re-election. The wall is their legacy and stands as a riverside reminder of one of the great civic foul-ups of this or any other time.
The current council planned to banish thousands of vehicles a day from Academy Street and turn it into a leafy, traffic free, net zero urban paradise. For every ardent supporter of the plan I'd guess there were 10 who had some degree of concern about it worsening the traffic problems which already exist to an often chaotic degree.
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The vast majority of traders - and without them there would be no city centre - were vehemently opposed to the upheaval and believed it would be disastrous for business.
Councillors were themselves hopelessly divided, with almost equal numbers supporting and opposing it.
After it scraped through on a vote by the narrowest of margins, the owners of the Eastgate Shopping Centre mounted a legal challenge which the council lost. The presiding judge ruled that a consultation process had been inadequate to the point of being unlawful. The council then decided to lick their wounds and consider what to do next in a meeting that would be held in private. The decision to exclude the public and the press from debate on such a hugely controversial issue looked like an attempt to cover-up their failings and shield themselves from further embarrassment. Then that decision was reversed in a U-turn. And finally, after countless hours had been spent and wasted by officials working on their Academy Street scheme it was decided to scrap it altogether.
At that meeting there was considerable talk about long-term strategies and the need to step back and "take a breather" and so on and so forth.
But it's also worth remembering that but for that court ruling they'd almost certainly have ploughed ahead with their plans anyway, regardless of warnings of traffic chaos or commercial disaster.
It was the verdict of Lord Sandison that prevented what would very likely have been another monumental foul-up. It's a pity he wasn't around when the council was in the grip of manic determination to build the Gathering Place.
After that three-year debacle many people hoped lessons had been learned and that we would not see the same degree of folly again.
The judge effectively saved the day on Academy Street. But the jury is still out on how many of those lessons were actually learned.
