A New Year and a new venue. The next meeting will take place on Monday, 31st January 2011 at Duncan Place Community Centre starting at 7pm. We’ve had to change the start time as the centre closes earlier but hope the change may attract new faces to our meetings. If you live in the Leith Links area and have an interest on what goes on in your local community it would be great to see you. You can print off an Agenda here agenda 310111
I hope you had a enjoyable and peaceful festive period and hope that 2011 is a good year for you all. With a new year the community council will also be moving to a new venue for meetings. Our next meeting which will take place on Monday, 31st January will be held at Duncan Place Community Centre and hope the move may attract new faces to get involved with local community issues. At our last meeting in November Leith Links Community Council voted to support the campaign against Forth Energy’s proposal for a huge power station to be built in the Leith Dock area. I suspect January is going to be a busy month as the Forth Energy plan should be submitted to Scottish Government next week and hope we can get volunteers to help get the message out to local residents who still haven’t heard about the plan. Concerned groups only have 28 days to submit objections from when the plan goes to the Scottish Government who will then make the final decision. If you want to sign the petition please visit the campaign site at www.noleithbiomass.org.uk
Weather permitting, around 200 local school pupils will be out on Leith Links this week, planting 5,000 crocus and 2,000 snowdrop bulbs. There’s been a great response from schools, and we could plant more bulbs if we had them … donations welcome! Contact Angus on 0131 555 5488 for more info.
The next meeting will take place on Monday, 29th November at Leith St Andrews Church Hall, Bottom of Easter Road. The meeting starts at 7.30pm and welcome all local residents.
The latest news we have is that Forth Energy plan to submit their planning application to build a large Biomass power plant on Leith Docks in November, with rumours that there will be a further public exhibition of the detailed plans in the next couple of weeks. The Application then goes through a ‘gateway’ checking process, before the statutory 28 day period for public consultation begins.
Malcolm Chisholm raised concerns that this could mean that the public consultation period could run over the festive period when everyone is on holiday. In this article in the Evening News, Calum Wilson, Director of Forth Energy, said in response:
“It is too early to say when the application will go in, but we have no intention of eroding the 28-day period. It depends how fast the gateway process is. If it only takes two weeks, we could submit the application at the end of November, which would mean the 28 days was up by Christmas. Or we could wait out until January if it gets the go ahead in mid-December. We will work with the Scottish Government to make sure there is a full, clear consultation period.”
There is therefore a possibility that things could suddenly move fairly quickly in the next couple of months. As we’re keen that local residents have as much of an opportunity as possible to make an informed response to the objection we recommend that you check out some of these key sources of information:
The Developer is Forth Energy. Click here to read the documentation relating to their Leith proposals.
The Scottish Government Energy Consent Unit is the body that will decide whether the plant will go ahead. At present they have published a ‘Scoping Opinion” that sets out the issues that Forth Energy must address in their detailed planning submission. Click here to read the Scoping Opinion.
Leith residents, community groups, and politicians recently led a call for a national moratorium on large biomass plants. An open letter was published in the Scotsman, on the Guardian website, as well as a number of other blogs. Read the letter and find out more on the Greener Leith website here.
Members of Leith Links Residents Association have also set-up the Leith Against the Biomass Plant Campaign Facebook Group.
As soon as we have more information on this major development, we’ll post another update.
The next meeting will be held at Leith St Andrews Church Hall on Monday 25,October starting at 7.30pm.The agenda can be found here,agenda 251010 and minutes of the previous meeting, minutes 270910. We hope you can come along.
Leith Links Community Council would like to work with local schools again this autumn to plant spring bulbs in Leith Links – last year’s very successful planting of 10,000 bluebell, crocus and snowdrop bulbs have made a lasting difference to the park and we would like to build on this.
We hope to organise a series of sessions during school time, probably in the week beginning Monday 8 November. We will provide the bulbs and the tools and overall supervision, in conjunction with the City of Edinburgh Council Park Rangers – we will show you where to plant and how to plant the bulbs. We’d expect each group to spend perhaps 30 minutes doing the planting, but you might want to combine this with other activities in the Links and if we are able to help with this we’d be happy to do so. Ideally we’ll be working with small groups (e.g. the Eco committee) or an individual class rather that the whole school.
Please contact Angus Miller 0131 555 5488 for more info.
The next community council meeting takes place at Leith St Andrews Church Hall,Bottom of Easter Road. The meeting starts at 7.30pm. The agenda can be printed off here agenda 270910 and minutes of previous meeting minutes 230810
This event is organised by Active Schools Edinburgh with support from sportscotland,healthier scotland and City of Edinburgh Council. Described as a great opportunity for families to experience a wide range of activities including rugby,football,golf,bmx and mountain biking, cricket and much more all for free
