A large proportion of my campaigning to improve Scotland’s National Parks takes place behind the scenes and doesn’t appear on parkswatch, partly due to the time involved but also because there are limits to what blogging can achieve. Other media is very important which is why I am so appreciative of the Strathy, an excellent local paper of whose like we need more, but it is often very difficult to get issues picked up by the national media even in the most scandalous cases like HIE’s mismanagement of Cairn Gorm.
To see the Herald, therefore, not just picking up on the costs of the funicular repairs but actively working to make these public as they have done over the last year is most gratifying. Their story earlier this week (see here) provides independent evidence which helps campaigners expose HIE’s spin for what it is as I tried to do yesterday (see here). I had no contact with Martin Williams on this and his story came as a pleasant surprise. Gordon Casely’s follow up letter then opened a new angle of criticism which was too much to resist! Having written the letter Friday afternoon I was not expecting it to appear the same day as my post.
The current £25m repair bill (originally costed by HIE at £16m) should be added to the £26m cost of building the funicular in the year 2000 (originally costed by HIE at £14m) with additional maintenance costs over 20 plus years. We have now reached the stage where this funicular railway has so far cost well in excess of £50m and counting. Most of this money has and will come from the public purse. What happened to the huge profits the funicular was supposed to generate, according to HIE’s fairy tale predictions? It is worth repeating the comment Dave Morris made on the post:
“In November 1997 the Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar MP, approved a payment of £9 million by HIE towards the construction of the funicular railway. This approval came with a condition: “there should be no further financial contribution to the project from the Secretary of State, whether through HIE or otherwise”. At that time HIE had fooled too many people into believing that the funicular would generate so much profit that no further public funds would be required on the mountain to meet annual running costs or future capital investment. HIE knew this was a lie but deliberately manipulated all the key political decision makers, in Scotland and the European Commission, to put a white elephant on the mountain in place of the promised magic money tree. Many £millions of public money will continue to be poured into this cess pit until the day that a Scottish politician orders HIE to remove itself from Cairn Gorm.”
I find it tragic that the mountain (or Cairn) that I improved my skiing on after the horrors of plastic in the late’60s in London and Kent; has deteriorated to a place I did not recognise when I went there earlier this year to ski. I loved being a ski instructor there in the early ’70s and even wangled a posting to Shanwick Oceanic Control in Prestwick, from Gatwick ATC, in order to ski there more often.
HIE have destroyed all skiing potential there, yet Glenmore and Aviemore provide, despite the odds, excellent backup, atmosphere and that unique experience I like to refer to as Tartan Après Ski.
What a terrible waste! We pioneered my Skirider invention there 20 years ago which was probably the last time that skiing on Cairn Gorm actually worked. The ski patrol and instructors were as I remember them only to find a few years later that Natural Retreats had utterly destroyed that friendly interchange between ski instructors and what we used to call punters. Socialising over lunch was discouraged. It was symptomatic of a total management malaise on the hill.
Since then we have usually gone to Glencoe and Nevis Range where, particularly in Glencoe’s case, intelligent management and development has made each season’s promise better than the last.
Nevis with its gondolas is another unique experience, but chairlifts more than suffice. It was arrant nonsense proposed by management types who had no experience of how ski slopes really work behind the scenes to propose such a disaster as the funicular. Since then there has been nothing other than scratching up clouds of dust to hide the incompetence of decision making and pretence that all is well. Never in the field of human endeavour has so much money and time been wasted on preserving reputations that had no foundation in reality.