A housebuilding giant is poised to make a fresh bid to build hundreds of homes on the edge of an Aberdeenshire town.
Stewart Milne Homes has confirmed it is in the process of drafting new proposals for its dropped 400-property Mains of Cowie development in Stonehaven, which included plans for a supermarket.
The original scheme was unanimously rejected by members of the local authority’s Kincardine and Mearns area committee earlier this year amid concerns about flooding and its visual impact on the area.
Local councillors also pointed out that the land had not been allocated within the local authority’s current or emerging local development plans (LDPs).
The Mains of Cowie development would also have included a new 210-pupil primary and a petrol station alongside the supermarket.
Stonehaven’s population has swelled to 11,000 in recent years and all four of the town’s primary schools along with Mackie Academy are struggling to cope, while the nearest large-scale supermarket is in Portlethen.
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Stewart Milne Homes said: “We are considering the submission of a revised planning application to the council.”
However, vice-chairman of Stonehaven and District Community Council, Phil Mills-Bishop, said the developer would have to “listen” to the views of the people of Stonehaven if it was drawing-up new proposals.
He also revealed he and chairman Knud Christensen had already held talks with a representative from Stewart Milne Homes.
He added: “If the application comes back unchanged then the community council is unlikely to support it and will object as it did with the original application.”
“I told him that any developer who wanted to get the support of the community council had to listen to what the community wanted.”
Mr Mills-Bishop said the group wanted the development to be “scaled back” and the number of houses reduced, and for Stewart Milne to agree to a hydrologist review to calculate surface water run-off estimates.
Mark Irvine, chairman of the Stonehaven Flood Action Group, said: “Stonehaven wasn’t designed for all these additional, sizeable developments where the water is obviously going to run down to the town centre, where we have had problems in the past.
“It is not a suitable location. We’d just have concerns about the run-off from that going down into Stonehaven.
“Although it is not within the flood area it could have an adverse effect on buildings.”
Chairman of the Stonehaven Town Partnership, Douglas Samways, said: “We sublet the caravan site to the Caravan Club and that was our concern, the visual impact and the flooding issue.
“They have just improved the facility dramatically, which is increasing the number of visitors to the town quite considerably. The Mains of Cowie would be overlooking it.
“I think from that point of view our position hasn’t really changed. In terms of a supermarket we’d have to be convinced it wasn’t going to have a detrimental impact on viability of the town centre.”
Stonehaven councillor Graeme Clark said he could not comment on any future application at the Mains of Cowie but said he hoped developers would start proposing schemes within land allocated in the LDP.