Group sticks with road campaign

POTHOLES is a hot topic for the Ballarat Residents and Ratepayers Association and members of the group are encouraging the community to display a ‘fix our roads’ bumper sticker as a call for change.

The free stickers are currently available at the Bunch of Grapes Hotel and other locations thoughtout the city that are listed on the Ballarat Residents and Ratepayers Association’s Facebook page.

Group president Bruce Crawford said it’s time the City of Ballarat got back to basics and focused on roads as the number one priority.

“Although we know there’s more to council’s work than rates, roads and rubbish we tend to go back to basics because we feel like they’ve gone too far into other areas,” he said.

“We get an enormous amount of feedback from the community about roads and plenty of people have been willing to put the stickers on their car.”

However, compared to this time last year, there are currently less outstanding road maintenance requests in the City, with 378 jobs listed on Monday 13 November compared to 800 which were listed at the end of last November 2022.

On Monday 13 November the City of Ballarat reported that 12 pothole repairs had been completed in the previous seven days, with only two left to action.

Mayor Cr Des Hudson encouraged the community to use the Snap, Send, Solve smartphone app so City of Ballarat staff could locate and fix potholes.

“I think it is a real partnership with our residents and we introduced the Snap, Send, Solve app for people’s phone that is easy to use,” he said.

“Residents can take photos of a pothole, the GPS will automatically recognise where it is and it will be sent off to council and logged.

“We all drive past a pothole and think someone else will make a report because we all have busy lives but if people want to be part of the solution it’s important to know where those potholes are.”

Mr Crawford said while reporting the potholes is part of the solution, there are also issues with how the potholes are currently being repaired.

“We’ve been putting potholes through the app as members of the public to see how the City interacts,” he said.

“One of the potholes that we picked on about a month later was showing signs of deterioration again.”

Following his recent re-election as mayor, Cr Hudson said the City’s roads are an issue at the forefront of councillors’ minds.

“It’s not the mayor’s agenda, the mayor’s job is to sell the decisions councillors make and certainly roads have been something that we’ve all felt the pressure form from our residents who have asked us to do more,” he said.

“We have increased our spending by more than $11 million from the previous year’s budget which went into our roads program.”