Road repairs has budget increase

By Lachlan Ellis

Moorabool Council has voted to increase its spending on road maintenance this month, as road conditions continue to worsen from rain damage.

A motion to increase the spending in the budget was moved by Cr Paul Tatchell during Urgent Business at the 2 November Ordinary Meeting of Council (OMC),

“I move the motion that Council delegates the Chief Executive Officer to increase the road maintenance budget of up to $600,000, to address deterioration of the road network. Part two would be, request development of a communication plan to inform the community of rectification works,” Cr Tatchell said.

Noting that “we can’t fix every road overnight”, Cr David Edwards asked Council officers what additional defects could be attributed to recent rain damage, and what the timeframe looked like on repairing Council’s roads.

“I couldn’t quantify it at the moment, not only do we have the additional maintenance through normal potholes, but we’ve got the damage from storms. They’re sort of intertwined…it’d be more than double,” Phil Jeffrey (General Manager of Infrastructure) said.

“Our plan is to try and hit it as hard as we can as early as we can. We obviously need a bit of a break in the weather to get things moving on the ground, but we’re organising contractors to get mobilised well before Christmas. We want to have a lot of the storm damage rectified prior to Christmas, and then the sealed roads will probably take a bit longer than that to get organised.”

Mr Jeffrey said they are hoping “early in the new year we’d be back on track, subject to weather being kind to us.”

The motion to increase road maintenance spending was approved unanimously by Council.