Update on land purchase

Our completed offer and paper work has been sitting with the land owner’s lawyer for quite some time now and we are working hard to try and speed things along. Everything hs been done at our end to ensure there is a speedy transaction but unfortunately there seems to be delay on the other side. We are working hard to try and getting things moving forward.

There have been two very positive meetings; one withe SEPA and one with the Tweed Commission and Scottish National Heritage. All three organisations are extremely supportive of our plans.

There will be a meeting of the Learning Zone group at the school on Wednesday, 13th May at 9am (all welcome) and there is the second public meeting at 6pm on teh evening of Monday, 18th May. Again, all welcome.

Barry (7th May 09)

BIG LOTTERY WIN!

We thought you might like to know some facts and figures about the campaign. The final details on the vote were as follows:

• Leswalt 4851
• Reston 6126

Even if we had lost out on the day given the number of votes we received we would have been the best runner up that week and we would have got the funding anyway. You may remember this is how Coldingham won in 2007.

On the day we had a voting hot line number that people could ring and then get the number to call.  At one point we were getting 40-50 calls an hour and calls were coming in from all over the place.

People or groups that supported our cause included:

• The staff at Torness power station
• The Open University Bird Watching Society
• Scottish Borders Environmental Partnership
• NCFE (Newcastle based qualifications provider)
• Post Office staff and Postal Workers union members, and
• Mindfizz Multimedia Ltd, an IT company based in Winchester that built and maintained the website and designed the posters. All this was done free of charge.

We had lots of support from Coldingham, Ayton, Chirnside and Coldstream, and a number of nature organisations from Berwick and Northumberland also gave their support. We also need to acknowledge the support we received from the Scottish Borders Council. Not only did they canvass their entire staff for support they also paid for 12 slots on Radio Borders that were broadcast on the day of the vote to let people know the number to call.

Then there were the votes that came in after our TV clip aired on Borders TV. People were reporting to us that 20 minutes after our clip was shown on TV the voting line was still busy and they couldn’t get through. We need to thank the pupils at Reston Primary School and the Reston Nursery and Playgroup children for making such an effective and endearing TV campaign.

We will put a fuller list of the various groups that supported us on the website.

Story so far

We are in the middle of a slow and sometimes frustrating stage in the project just now as we:

1.       Work to meet the National Lottery legal and financial requirements. This involves signing and agreeing a contract, setting up a new (lottery funding only) bank account and establishing auditing procedures.

2.       Work through the land purchase with our lawyer from Iain Smith and Partners, based in Galashiels and Duns.

3.       Sort out the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) requirements.

This work has been on-going since early December 2008, though we were only given the green light to start the project officially in February 2009. The funding contract has been signed, the paper work is almost complete and the project initiation meeting with the National Lottery has successfully taken place. There are one or two other bits of National Lottery paperwork still outstanding and these will been completed this month.

The initial title deed searches have been done and we estimate that the land purchase will take 8-10 weeks to complete. So, hopefully, it will be sorted by the end of May.

This gives us time to look at setting up teams to coordinate the work that needs to be done.

Next Stages

We think the best way to organise the work we have agreed to do is to create three different work strands and ask people if they want to help with one of these lines of work. Ideally, we would like these work streams to take responsibility for the work and plan and organise how it should be done. This way we hope to involve as much of the community (that wants to get involved) as possible. The three strands would be:

• River Management - This work stream is going to be coordinated by Logan Inglis and Dave Cree.

• The Learning Zone - This work stream will be coordinated by Jayne Waite.

• Planting - We are looking for someone to help us take this work forward.

These are just our initial thoughts and we welcome other ideas.

If you are interested in helping with one or more of these work streams then please come along to the meeting on the 20^th April or contact us through the website.

Reston village is small, (80 or so houses) so if we are to create this wild space that people can visit and enjoy we will need your support.

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