It’s back to the burghs again this week.
But after the celebration of the marvellous Mo and all the forward motion Gable Endies seems to be enjoying at the minute, we’re not on such a positive plain today.
For as long as I’ve worked on this newspaper, the ‘battle of the burghs’ has been as constant a feature as the travels up and down the divisions of our four Angus senior football clubs.
In a different time it was the distribution of wealth as the old District Council and then Tayside Region splashed the cash on local projects; but even when those times were considerably less straitened than they are now, the bickering over which town was the favoured son of Angus raged.
Approval of big bucks schemes had elected representatives regularly reaching for the calculator to do the sums which they believed would prove their town was a loser in the spending stakes, while a neighbour was very much the jackpot winner.
So now it is a bit more than mutterings which are coming out of Monifieth, which fears it is being left further and further behind places like Montrose, Forfar and Brechin where shiny new sports centres and admittedly superb community campuses have popped up in recent years.
With no community hub or leisure centre to call its own, Monifieth hoped its luck might turn when the council landed almost a million pound windfall for a slice of land needed by a developer to access a site for hundreds of new homes.
It’s hard to argue against an expectation the cash would stay local to help bring the burgh in line with the rest of Angus and soak up some of the infrastructure and service pressures which the additional housing will undoubtedly bring.
A plea to invest it in skip site provision was ignored and now – after the lottery declared Monifieth too well off to merit a million quid for a community hub – the idea of re-examining how the housing land bonus might be spent has also been rejected.
Casting their eye across the rest of the county, I doubt the residents of Monifieth are feeling like the rich relations of Angus right now.
