Sue Gyford: Blizzard of problems that left Hillend on a slippery slope

IT HAS, ironically, been a boom season for most of Scotland's ski resorts. The thick snow of recent weeks has brought droves of winter sports enthusiasts to the slopes in numbers rarely seen in modern times.

Yet, at the Midlothian Snowsports Centre at Hillend, the future is looking as bleak as the worst of our winter weather.

Thousands of skiers and snowboarders pack its slopes every weekend, with young enthusiasts rubbing shoulders with Olympic hopefuls, yet while the centre – the biggest of its kind in Britain – remains as popular as ever, this may not be enough to secure its future.

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Crippling annual losses of 500,000 and the need for expensive maintenance at the 45-year-old facility may be enough to force the closure of large parts of the complex.

The centre has had its ups and downs since opening in 1965, but the latest crisis appears to be the gravest yet.

The facilities are beginning to show their age after years of make-do-and-mend upkeep.

Staff are said to have had to resort to patching up the main run with materials from secondary slopes.

Serious investment – almost certainly more than the 4 million proposed less than three years ago – is now needed.

Jane Rahil is chairwoman of the Lothian Ski Racing Association – which runs training sessions at the slope three times a week and counts 29 Olympians among its alumni, including Winter Olympics hopeful Andy Noble – and she says the centre's closure would leave a massive hole in not just Lothians' but Scotland's sports facilities.

She says: "It's nothing to do with it's popularity, it's just to do with Midlothian Council deciding that they can't fund it any more. It's really well used, it's very busy. I have no idea why they've decided that they can't afford to run it anymore.

"We have over 200 race trainees at any given time. We've got a large proportion of trainees who come over from Glasgow because the hill we've got is enormous and is the biggest of its kind in Britain.

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"It's very steep at the top, so for a competition piste there's nowhere like it in Britain, and we get people coming up from England."

The current problems stem from the fact that Midlothian Council – which is responsible for its upkeep despite Midlothian residents accounting for only a fifth of visitors – is having to make 18 million of cuts to its budget.

The Hillend centre has had a chequered financial past.

The words "financial disaster" were being used to describe it in the early 1990s when it made an estimated loss of 236,000 in just 12 months. Then, it was saved by a package of emergency cuts, including shorter opening hours and an extra two-week shut down in the summer.

That was enough to tide the centre through until the emergence of snowboarding in the mid-1990s, which saw a new rush of customers to Hillend, buoying its finances further.

Although losses were cut, the deficit still stood at 188,000 a year, and the ageing infrastructure was starting to cause problems.

The rusting chair lift, for example, had to closed for vital repairs right in the middle of the 1994-5 winter season. There was even talk of closure in 1996 as Midlothian took over the running of the centre, following local government reorganisation, with the new local authority concerned about balancing its books.

This time around, the financial choices are even starker. Councillor Colin Beattie, Midlothian's SNP deputy group leader, says: "The place is reaching a period in its life when it needs a bit more work and none of that is cheap, because the buildings have reached the point where they need refurbishment and the maintenance costs have gone up. Staffing costs have shifted as well.

"Every council is suffering a contraction in its budget. (You have to ask yourself] do you chop that off the health budget? Do you cut roads maintenance? Do we cut back on the quality of education or the number of teachers? I think there will be a very tough debate on it."

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The main hope for the future remain outside help, in the shape of a private investor or SportScotland.

The national sports agency is expected to be asked to bail out the complex to keep its doors open.

The council is understood to have drawn a blank in efforts to find a buyer, and talks with a private developer about a joint project to create a five-star hotel, tourist village and country club on a neighbouring site are on hold while the future of the ski centre is decided.

Eddie Guest, president of the Scottish Ski Club, says it shouldn't be impossible to find a way of keeping Hillend open.

"The people running the place don't seem to have had the vision to really make it a success," he says.

"It's an incredible facility given its size, it's invaluable to our future international racers, and there's definitely a good opportunity there for someone to actually go in and make a real go out of it and make some money out of it. It's a slightly wasted opportunity by Midlothian, I think."