Trump International Golf Links profile is posted ...

[Richard Phinney]

Sorry to intervene in an interesting post on the architectural merits of Trump International.  But i wanted to point out that the local jobs analyses were hardly independent, given the bodies that paid for them and what they wanted to hear, and have been called absurd by truly independent economists.  The unemployment rate for able bodied people in Aberdeenshire is less than 2%, one of the lowest in the Western world. The ongoing jobs - at or near the minimum wage - were never a replacement for Oil jobs.  And were never going to be filled primarily by locals. 

Patrick

I think you hit the nail on the head. There has to be a compromise. In this instance the compromise was made on the promise of six or seven thousand jobs depending on which side of the bed Donald got out of on any particular day. It would appear those claims were spurious to say the least.

Niall

The planning application that Trump submitted estimated 4600 new jobs (mostly temp construction jobs during the build out phases) with 1200-1400 new permanent jobs resulting from ongoing operations, including jobs gained from the residual economic activity in the local area. There were multiple independent economic analysis reports/studies conducted by the local council and the national gov't that validated Trump's Deloitte economic report. The estimated time for build out used was 7 years.

BTW there were/are several Scottish national economic forecasts on record at the time of application that estimated a drop of ~9000 oil industry jobs in the Aberdeen/NE Scotland region by 2015 and upwards of 15,000 going away by 2020.

So while some have correctly pointed out the relatively rosy current and recent employment numbers in the Aberdeen area- The large scale development project proposed by Trump was embraced by most of the local business people in the area/region from a long term economic and tourism standpoint.

Hopefully the 2nd course will get built along with the hotel (smaller version) and a chunk of the other residential development so that the local economy can benefit to the greatest extent still possible. I'd like to spend a couple of days there in 2016. 

[Mark Pearce]

Richard is, of course, right.  Aberdeen has the lowest unemployment rate of any UK city at under 2% and Aberdeenshire as a county is even better.  One of the real challenges for the local economy is attracting sufficient talent.