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The Oban North Pier Panto: writs, gazebos, TIFs, making millions [?] and fantasy business plans

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‘Oh no they won’t.’ ‘Oh yes they will.’

Oban’s father and son businesses team of Alan and Callum McLeod have singlehandedly regenerated what had been an unattractive and prominent part of the town’s waterfront with their highly regarded twin restaurants, Ee-usk and Piazza, in pole position on the North Pier.

Rather than supporting this potent local success, Argyll and Bute Council’s cack-handed actions in the Oban variant of the dead parrot of the CHORD 5-towns regeneration project, have put those businesses – vital to the local economy and to Oban’s  promise to visitors – under threat.

For lack of anything remotely resembling consultation, never mind timely consultation; and for lack of any consideration of their position, the MacLeods have now been forced to issue a writ against Argyll and Bute Council, which will be served next Tuesday, 17th February, dictated by court scheduling.

The writ is designed to prevent the council from restricting the title rights of access to the restaurant businesses on the North Pier – genuine and demonstrably well founded concerns which the council has chosen to disregard.

One of the sad things about this mess, is seeing Councillor Roddy McCuish, a fundamentally good man, affected by power and responsibility as Chair of the Area Committee to the point where he is clearly unable to see the reality of the North Pier proposal from the different point of view of the MacLeods. He has said some silly things in the Oban Times today. These are factually incorrect in material instances, unnecessarily seek to undermine the MacLeods and amount to no more than the testosterone chest beating he should know better than to start.

The North Pier proposal is, for the cost of it, one of the silliest and most ridiculously overblown projects we have seen in as long as memory allows. It is simply unintelligent to allow a puff like this to endanger a very serious and successful business on the site, which has done a great deal for many aspects of Oban’s economy.

The source of restriction of access

The Council’s amusingly naive intention is to waste millions in erecting on the North Pier, just behind the restaurants, a very expensive bus shelter [but grandly called the Maritime Visitor Facility] – that it is itself less than a shelter and more of a wind tunnel, with generous open entrances at the three cardinal points from where the wind is most likely to arrive.

This gazebo, the substantial volume of the overall structure, is just that, a windblown open space but roofed over, a space which can also shelter local farmers markets – a good idea but at this price ticket?

The rest of the structure is a small facility at the back of and adjoining the east quadrant of the gazebo, below the Columba Hotel, where the shack known as the White Building now stands.

What will adjoin the gazebo and occupy a lot of that footprint will be one office, which may or may not be for rent; three lavatory/shower cubicles; 5 washing machines; and 9 lockers – designed for the non-existent leisure sailors whose presence on might-be pontoons the council has stubbornly rubbished and resisted for years now – and which remains far from certain.

But if the sailors never materialise [and even if they do], the nine lockers might come in handy for summer rough sleepers making use of the  wind break; men coming off the trawlers might find it handy just to thrown their fishy kit into the washing machines here, rather than take them home; and wild campers will love the shower and loo cubicles. The gazebo is not going to make Oban money, it may not even be particularly salubrious but it will keep some folk happier than they might otherwise be. No pain no gain.

For the MacLeods, there is first the impact of the folly on what will be restricted access to their businesses, impinging on the legal access rights which the title of their lease confers upon them.

Beyond that, this planned use of the structure as a collection point for cruise ship passengers tendered ashore to be embarked and disembarked from fleets of buses for day trips ashore will be a major obstruction to the visibility as well as the access to their restaurants in the busiest summer season.

That is when the cruise ships come -  not in Spring, Summer or Winter.

This usage will see times when urgently needed delivery vans and trucks with supplies for the restaurants, will not be able to access the restaurants.

Worse, the coinciding of these mass bus trips with vehicles delivering fuel and supplies to and removing cargo from fishing boats and day tour vessels at the end of the pier, on the far side of the restaurants, will see them at the centre of a maelstrom of transport movements. This is wholly inconsistent with the offer of those restaurant businesses.

A ‘ performance space’?

The council is also touting this structure as an open air performance space, with ribald jokes in circulation amongst some local wags that the North Pier Club may displace the Mile High Club as a venue for the daring in performances of a kind the council is hardly envisaging; and which the restaurant businesses would find unwelcome.

That possibility aside, a performance space is basically no more than a space in which anyone chooses to perform anything. The chosen space is a ‘performance space’ only for the duration of what is performed there.. It might be a lift, a corridor, a street corner, a bridge – or indeed an everyday bus shelter.

A formal performance space is one set up for the purpose. There is no provision in any plans we have seen to spend money on the necessary resources to equip this space as a ‘formal performance space’.

It is therefore misleading to present this minimalist shelter as ‘a performance space’ the council is providing for the town. The ability to run a light sequence in it does not make it a performance space, but an attraction on rare occasions. The Esplanade, the areas around the South Pier, parts of Stevenson Street offer every bit as much support for imaginative open air public performance as does a wind tunnel under a roof on the North Pier.

McCaig’s Tower is an informal performance space with awesome potential for some genuinely astonishing work to be done there – if the imagination, the skills and the will existed to use it in that way. That these do not appear to exist would suggest that the shelter on the pier may see the occasional pipe band performance and maybe the odd impromptu ceilidh when the weather keeps its promises.

A business case?

For Argyll received, under Freedom of Information, the Full Business Case for this project. The costs had been redacted, a decision which, in this instance we are challenging since the council is itself the developer in the application to itself for planning permission – which it was, unsurprisingly, minded to consent.

We have therefore asked for an internal review of that decision to be conducted, with the due public interest tests applied. If we are not then satisfied with the response we get, we will take the  matter to the Commissioner for adjudication.

However, the business case itself is a hilarious exercise in sleight of hand. We offer it, as received and redacted, for public entertainment, attached at the foot of this article.

While we will report on it in detail shortly, for the moment it is worth noting that it is weightily overburdened with irrelevant material relating to other projects [none of which are beyond the proposal stage] and generally exaggerated self-promotionally oriented material around what passes for the council’s economic planning.

When you subtract this content, it has been clearly designed to add apparent bulk to the thinnest of cases for this adventure.

It mentions:

  • anticipated visitor numbers, including cruise ship passengers taking shelter while waiting for their buses – while giving no foundation whatsoever for how these numbers have been arrived at;
  • that this shelter on the pier is ‘a key component of these wider regeneration aims’ [ the aims in question centering on the Lorn Arc Tax Incremental Funding [TIF] project which stretches to Dunstaffnage and includes ‘ marine science, marine tourism, aquaculture and renewable energy sectors’. Quite how a roof over an open space and three loos on the North Pier can be said to be ‘a key component’ of this wider notional ambition is an invitation to satire;
  • that this facility is ‘designed to work alongside future step ashore and seasonal short stay marina facilities which are currently being proposed for both north and south of the North Pier’. While the planned grandiloquent provision of three lavatory/shower cubicles, five washing machines and nine lockers would be of use to visiting yachtsmen, if there were any and when and if the council overcomes its how-many-years-long? concocted objections to the pontoons that would facilitate such arrivals.

In looking at the conditions which would determine the viability of the project, it notes:

  • right upfront, the biggest escape card of all- the ‘capacity and competence of the consultancy team’
  • ‘attracting fixed prices tenders from quality contractors within budget’
  • ‘co-operation of utility companies and key stakeholders, such as Transport Scotland and CMAL/Calmac’ – and all for a bus shelter?
  • ‘significant on site management and inspection for the duration of each element’ – a highly innovative introduction for any construction project?
  • ‘long term management agreements being secured and enforced [Ed: our emphasis] with the private/not for profit sector’ – this refers to some outfit sufficiently short of the pennies to make up a shilling contracting to maintain the facility [don't imagine the council intends to do this], to run it at a level of success capable of fulfilling the Economic Impact Analysis for the bus shelter project, which estimates that over 15 years the asset will generate £22.6m, support 59 full time equivalent jobs and provide a gross added value of £11m to the Oban economy’ Well now. Won’t there be a welter of keen ‘private sector and third sector [?]‘ takers for this one?
  • ‘Uncertainties over the short stay pontoon/berthing facilities being resolved through discussion with local operators.’ – and this is one of the key purposes of the gazebo; and this is a full business case’?

Oh – and the paper does glibly mention the council’s commitment to a ‘cafe culture’, somehow forgetting that, in Piazza, one of the two MacLeod restaurants on site, they have just that culture to hand on the North Pier – and are complacently setting about putting it at risk.

And so…

There is a great deal more of the same detachment from reality to deal with and when we’ve stopped giggling we’ll get down to that.

But nothing – not the sheer volume of irrelevant material in the paper, not the rhetoric of economic development this council, on performance, knows nothing about – can disguise the bald fact that this is an entirely speculative project which by its nature can never hope to get anywhere near the exaggerated claims being made for the economic development contribution it will make.

The paper admits the shelter is certain to go over budget – whatever the redacted budget figure is. It proposes to go ahead and build it anyway and tell the Area Committee afterwards how much more money will  be needed to operate it.

Nowhere in the paper is there any evidence whatsoever of the council even having addressed the nature of the facilities management company they would need to take on the proposed contract to maintain the structure and to run it as an events venue at the profit level capable of, over 15 years, generating £22.6m, supporting 59 full time equivalent jobs and providing a gross added value of £11m to the Oban economy.

This  gig is presented as the ‘Full Business Case’ yet it has never contemplated what sort of outfit would take this on; what its durability might be; where the council might find such a philanthropic company; whether it exists?

The most telling little inclusion for us was the quiet addition of the words ‘not for profit’ [there won't be any]  to the privatish sector company on which their fantasy is formally based. This is the true extent of the council’s vision for the future management of this shelter.

Oban may cross its fingers that the MacLeod’s writ carries the day.

Otherwise millions of pounds – which could have done something constructive for this needy town, will be wasted on a shelter which can make no appreciable economic difference – but may well put a lasting smile on faces of the satirists.

Note 1: Here is the Full Business Case for this project, as received, with financial figures redacted. When you read it and the grandness of its fantasy vision, keep reminding yourself tat what they are talking about is a roofed shelter, open to the winds on three sides and with  three loos/showers, five washing machines and nine lockers in the back for the occasional sailor: FINAL North Pier Maritime Visitor Facility FBC Report 20th August 2014

Note 2: The information on the claims of the Economic Impact Analysis for the bus shelter project, estimating that ‘over 15 years the asset will generate £22.6m, support 59 full time equivalent jobs and provide a gross added value of £11m to the to the Oban economy’ were not revealed to us but were provided to a third party by VisitScotland’s Regional Tourism Director.


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