It would seem that once-bitten is more twice-bitten than twice shy in Oban.
The father and son business partnership of Alan and Callum Macleod have been bitten already with Argyll and Bute Council’s ill-considered development plan for a gazebo cum wind-tunnel on the North Pier threatening their successful and stylish twin-restaurant business – Ee-usk and Piazza - that has transformed the pier head.
Their new business project promises to be equally if not more transformative of this part of Oban’s run-down waterfront. It is the creation of a boutique hotel on the site of the derelict old Argyll Hotel on the Esplanade, which the Macleod’s bought and eventually got permission to demolish.
This project has now hit a snag of a different kind but one which also devolves on a council that is nothing if it is not illiterate when it comes to economic development [amongst other responsibilities].
It has emerged that Oban has an insufficient supply of natural gas to supply the needs of the new hotel.
Scottish Gas Network [SGN] has informed the Macleods that they are unable to meet the requirements of the forthcoming hotel and can do nothing beyond providing – a domestic supply.
Here is a lovely if shabby town, once and potentially again the most spectacular on the west coast but struggling with its necessary regeneration – and energetic private sector businesses are faced with wholly inadequate basic infrastructural provision.
Here you have a council muttering about Argyll’s depopulation crisis, facing the imperative of the creation and implementation of an effective economic development plan.
Here you have a council that nevertheless chose to replace its Executive Director responsible for infrastructure and economic development with a waste management specialist [who happened to be known to the current CEO] , leaving itself critically short on expertise in an area where lack of experienced successful performance is seeing Argyll dying on its feet.
Here you have a council which, having rendered redundant the need for a high level performer in the infrastructure and economic development brief, is now trawling the community in search of so called ‘business-champions’. As if any one with any genuine business nous wold put their credibility in the hands and at the disposal of this council.
If anything were further proof of the cost of dismissing the need for an infrastructure and economic development specialist, the revelation of this fundamental infrastructural deficiency is it.
One of Argyll’s five bigger towns, desperately in need of new businesses, of more jobs, of a more attractive harbour area, of facilities to a contemporary standard of excellence to support its tourist offer – has access to no more than domestic-level gas supplies to fuel enterprise?
What about the water supply; the capacity of the sewage system; the electricity supply?
Questions must now arise on the capability of all of the basic infrastructural services on which business development in Oban [and possibly across Argyll] depends.
Exactly what sort of business development is Oban capable now of supporting? Crystal ball gazers and Tarot card readers [very low tech] – who could of course set up temporary residence in the gazebo cum wind tunnel to come – where no client would expect to be warm anyway?