Airpolice the written form isn't my best I would fully agree. And yes I had remedial help up to 16 years old with it, and even failed O grade english first time. But you can be assured the science subjects and maths no additonal help was required.
In fact my partner in crime in said remedial classes, who also had his arm put in a sling to stop him using his left hand, is part of the design team at CERN that has just managed to hold antimatter for a 1000 seconds. I am no where near his level of inteligence but then again not many folk are. But you can't trust him with a screw driver and he can't reverse park a car if his life was riding on it. He doesn't like being called rainman either.
As for the council and manning levels, its fairly typical method of down sizing without getting to much adverse
PR. Drop from 12-8 with 4 getting relocated to different jobs, then in a few months time things arn't working so chop another couple. Give it another couple of months then chop another 2 if folk haven't left already, then another couple of months and things still haven't improved chop another 2 and your then down to a more realistic 2-3 members of staff.
As a suggestion to the firemen why don't you use that highly expensive compressor for your BA sets to fill diving bottles?
And get someone skilled up enough to hydrotest the bottles. There are hundreds of the bloody things in the area (all the firestations need them done as well) and the last time I needed one done in that area it had to go down to Glasgow or Aberdeen. 30 quid a pop for a hydrotest and 5 quid a fill for a diver.
But then this obvious branching out using payed for reasources is so against the normal council employee mentality I am sure they will find a whole raft of rules which prevents them from aquiring I will admit a modest income stream.
As for the style of the airport and customer experence they really need to get a grip. There are quite a few highly experenced controllers in semi retirement kicking around the highlands, the one that springs to mind I was suprised to see in the Scilly Islands last time I visited. Get one of them in with a sharp pencil with the rule book and show the lads how to really run a FISO service. Do some exchanges with other FISO service airports which have way more experence than Oban. The level of traffic of big stuff is pie in the sky but with a change in attitude you should be able to increase the GA significantly.