Accused of acting in haste

Gordon Berry, The Courier, 30 March 2004

Controversy over a Fife Council recommendation for approval of a major golf-related planning application at St Andrews continued yesterday as the town’s community council accused the local authority of acting with “haste” in the decision-making process.

The criticism has come from members of the planning committee of St Andrews Community Council, who have questioned traffic generation figures supplied by St Andrews Links Trust and have called for the provision of a full traffic impact assessment.

The comments have been made in relation to the trust’s application for the creation of a new public golf course, clubhouse and greenkeeping facilities on land at Kinkell and Brownhllls.

Speaking on behalf of the committee, Dr Ian Goudie said that the speed of the process was problematic for various reasons, and he pointed out that after a recent public hearing the applicants had submitted further material to the council.

This material, he said, had been sent out to the community council after its last meeting, but the application itself is to be dealt with today - before the next community council meeting takes place.

“It appears from the officials’ report that they too have had insufficient time to carry out their duty to assess whether the applicants’ assertions are adequately supported by scientific evidence.

“The officials do not appear to have noted that traffic generation figures still make no allowance for non-golfing users of the site, nor questioned whether a 40-seat restaurant will really only serve golfers.

“The report accepts uncritically the assertion that there will be 105 trips in and 105 trips out of the development each day, without even any recognition that an annual average is essentially useless.

“The statistics are obtained by averaging data for February, May, August and November. If you took this approach to junction capacity, you could prove conclusively that gridlock never occurs in St Andrews!” said Dr Goudie.

He said that the seventh course would generate its greatest volumes of traffic over the summer months at the times when the town is least able to cope with it.

This, said Dr Goudie, is the key point that officials should have been noting.

He said that the report from officials admits “rather plaintively” that overall the town will progressively get busier and further long term measures to restrain and mitigate traffic growth will be required in the future. Such measures, it is claimed, are currently being considered within the forthcoming St Andrews Transport Plan.

“So yet again the officials intend to hold a public consultation on how the stable door should be closed once they have already allowed the horse to bolt.

“If they were wishing to find a better approach for incurring the wrath of the public, it would he hard to think of one!” he said.

The application, along with another concerning a golf and leisure development at Feddinch, is to be considered at today’s meeting of the East Area development committee.

Yesterday Dr Goudie was also highly critical of the recommendations for approval of both application, and he said that they were “very bad news for St Andrews."

Dr Goudie emphasised that he was now speaking personally and not on behalf of the community council, but he claimed that there could be permanent damage to the probable Green Belt area around the town.

There would, he said, be a restaurant on a prominent site on the unbullt coastline and a large clubhouse with 40 two-bedroom suites at Feddinch.

“Sadly the application for the seventh course is another instance where some members of the public will believe that officials are not giving balanced and impartial advice.

“This is particularly transparent in the comments on the Structure Plan Policy on Development on the Undeveloped Coast”

Dr Goudie said that Fife’s policy on the undeveloped coast now has a very chequered history, having been deemed relevant to the Hungry Horse site, but not to Kingask or Kinkell Braes.

“The combined effects of the council’s contempt for its own development plan and its failure to keep its word on the prematurity of applications for the putative Green Belt land look dire.

“It will clearly take several more years to get a Green Belt in place, and during that time the prematurity clause in the structure plan serves as the finger in the dyke as far as the town’s Green Belt is concerned.

“If Fife Council recklessly removes that protection, and shows that its own development plan policies can be circumvented, there will be nothing to save the area from a flood of further applications. Developers will have little difficulty in establishing that the council has itself accepted that the prematurity clause and the environmental protection policies are weak and ineffective.

“The Green Belt will be dead before it is born,” he said.