Funding boost for road maintenance

CITY of Ballarat staff are looking to fix a long list of roads across the region over the holiday period.

Cr Tess Morgan announced the municipality’s road maintenance blitz, said to be the largest annual spend towards roads the City has undertaken, on Monday last week.

The municipality is allocating nearly $6.3 million to the upkeep of more than 340,000 square kilometres of the region’s roads over the next five months.

“So many people care about the safety and the quality of our roads,” Cr Morgan said.

“It’s exciting to announce so much spend on our roads to ensure they’re up to scratch, safe, and usable, and that we can get to where we need to go.”

Works include asphalt patching and resurfacing, and bitumen resealing, with a focus on potholes, cracks and surface deterioration.

Arterial roads like Alfredton’s Dyson Drive, Scott Parade in Ballarat East, Greenhalghs Road towards Bunkers Hill, Gillies Road near Creswick, Cardigan’s Blind Creek Road, Link Road in Wendouree, and Buninyong-Mount Mercer Road are among the routes to be patched up.

“We change our pavement depth on different roads,” said executive operations manager Luke Ives.

“That’s to address traffic volumes, water, decrease and the extent of damage on the road itself.

“We monitor that road and that feeds into future capital works like if roads need increase in their capacity or a rebuild, that feeds into the capitals side and then we maintain what’s there.”

The City of Ballarat spent $4 million in April to repair sealed roads throughout the region as part of its annual major patching and resurfacing maintenance program.

That initiative covered sections of 70 roads across 44,000 square metres.

Director of infrastructure Bridget Wetherall said the increase in funds is part of more than $30 million that has been allocated for capital road infrastructure works in the municipality’s 2024/25 budget.

“[It] comes from part of our infrastructure budget and our operations budget, and we do have a large capital renewal program,” she said.

“This is extending the life of this asset without having to renew it.

“There’s generally not one reason why roads deteriorate… but if we can get to a road that’s starting to show what where, we can get onto it and maintain it which pushes our renewals out by a number of years.”

The municipality will be using recycled materials in patching up the roads, a method which was adopted during the last blitz.