By Democrat reporter
It’s not just President Donald Trump who is being accused of operating from a disinformation bubble today. Flamingo Land has been accused of “shifting the goalposts and using “distortion and disinformation” in its desperate bid to build “a garish and widely opposed mega-resort” on the shores of Loch Lomond at Balloch.
The application for a sprawling tourist resort on the southern shore of Loch Lomond at Balloch was unanimously rejected by the National Park’s board. This came after 155,000 people lodged their objections through a long-running campaign led by Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer. Objections also came in from the Woodland Trust, Ramblers Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland and environmental watchdog SEPA.
Mr Greer said: “Flamingo Land’s appeal is based on distortion and disinformation. They are trying to shift the goalposts, bend the truth and misrepresent their own proposals. It is a desperate attempt to overturn the unanimous decision by the Park board to reject their application.
“Our campaign to save Loch Lomond from Flamingo Land’s destructive proposals secured a record 155,000 objections. The National Park’s own expert planning officers even opposed it, as did Scotland’s national environment watchdog, SEPA and the Community Council.
“The fact that Flamingo Land have come back with this outright nonsense shows the contempt they have for Balloch and Loch Lomond.
“They have spent a decade trying to exhaust the community into submission, but they have lost at every step. I urge the Scottish Government to reject these catastrophic plans and end this sorry saga.”
As Mr Greer documents in his objection, Flamingo Land’s appeal includes a number of errors and distortions:
- Flamingo Land claims the National Park could have insisted the overall scale of the application be reduced. It is their responsibility as the applicant to reduce the size of their application, if that is what they think is necessary. Over the course of almost a decade they haven’t done this, they have just moved the pieces around the map. At no point during the planning hearing did they suggest a reduction in scale. Under planning law the Scottish Government must make a decision based on what Flamingo Land actually submitted, not a theoretical smaller application which they didn’t submit but seem to be suggesting now.
- They are trying to use National Planning Framework policies on housing to argue in their favour, but this isn’t a housing development, it’s a tourist resort. Ross Greer’s submission states that this claim is outright misleading.
- They claim the National Park’s assessment of the resort’s economic impact was ‘neutral’ when the Park report actually said ‘The scale of the development proposed with the identified risk of flooding, and reduction in the extent of woodland, is not compatable [sic] development in view of the National Park’s environment and economy.’
- They are trying to claim an exemption from the flooding concerns which were fundamental to the National Park board’s rejection of their application, but still haven’t done the “further flood risk work” which SEPA say is required
- They failed to update their Environmental Impact Assessment to reflect the (inadequate) flood mitigation proposals already included in the application. These mitigations would require groundwork in areas where their own testing found contamination close to the surface, creating a new risk.
Flamingo Land’s plans included two hotels, a waterpark, over 100 woodland lodges, 370 parking spaces, a monorail, shops, restaurants and more on the proposed site at Balloch. Their own assessment shows that this would result in over 250 additional car journeys per hour on local roads at peak times.