Residents call for road repairs

IN their four years living at Smythesdale’s Noble Street, David and Claire McVeigh have had a consistent source of frustration.

Their property is located off a roughly 500-metre stretch of bending gravel road with the exits onto Browns Road currently marred by corrugation and potholes.

Ms McVeigh has been asking the municipality for about six weeks to have the road graded, which she said is nothing new.

“We’ve been asking since we moved in for it to be graded and council have done it a couple times. They probably do it about once a year,” she said.

“As soon as they do though, you get the motorbikes coming in and people going to the nursery. As soon as it rains it all gets flushed away.

“I get they’re busy but recently when I called in, they said we weren’t even on the list to be done in the next six months.”

Wendy Stingers has lived at Noble Street for about a decade, and said the road is falling apart worse than normal.

“We’ve all been asking for the last six months to have it graded and nothing’s happening which begs the question, why?” she said.

“All the blocks have been built on here, and there’s a lot more traffic than there was, so it’s only going to degrade quicker being the surface it is now.”

Mr McVeigh said he’d prefer a more long-term solution.

“We’ve got like 10 houses up here and a lot of the others have been saying that we’d like to see it asphalted instead,” he said.

“Council brought the black lines in to assess it but that was before the nursery came in, and apparently there wasn’t enough traffic then.

“They said at the time, you need 70 cars a day but I don’t reckon any street in Smythesdale except the main road would get that.

“It’s 2023 so it seems pretty outdated to still have a gravel road for a populated street like this.”

Golden Plains Shire’s road register lists 716 kilometres of unsealed roads, 15 kilometres of which is at Smythesdale.

Mayor, Cr Brett Cunningham said their program, which allows for roads to be graded once per year, was suspended to focus on roads impacted by recent rains.

He also said Noble Street won’t be getting sealed anytime soon.

“At this stage there are no plans to convert Noble Street into a paved road following traffic counts undertaken by council which do not warrant sealing of the road,” he said.

“Sealing of an unsealed road is dependent on a range of criteria including location, traffic volumes, crash history, community support, maintenance history and budget availability.

“The cost of sealing this unsealed road can be between $250,000 to $500,00 depending on a number of factors including if drainage works and kerb and channel are required.”