I had to travel to Roma today and as I had to do a job South of Muckadilla on the way, I travelled all the way from Kandimulla on council roads, a mixture of dirt, gravel and bitumen.
It made me think about transport infrastructure. For many people in rural and remote parts of the shire, roads form the single most important part of service delivery by council.
Council controls 5,602 kilometres of roads, being 1,293 kilometres of bitumen, 2,732 kilometres of gravel and 1,577 kilometres of formed of roads. With an annual maintenance budget of $1.2 Million it works out at $214.00 per kilometre.
If there was one good to come out of the massive flooding experienced in 2001/11 it was the allocation of $40 million to be spent on flood repairs and upgrades to the roads of the shire. Coupled to the $8.21 million council has allocated from their own coffers for capital works, I would hope that, this will allow for better roads requiring less maintenance into the future. All this means that in the current financial year, council will spend $49.4 million on roadworks within the shire. In the coming years, the continued cost of maintenance of these roads will become a priority.
Council will have to keep in front of the ball looking for innovative techniques and work practices to do more with the limited amount of funds available. One way to fund the increasing cost of maintenance is to "Jack up the fees and charges" but the best way to address this is by looking for different work practices and technologies that allow you to do more with less.
Use of things such as Goetextiles and Pavement Stabilisation as well as careful selecting of road building materials allows for the building of longer lasting roads while the use of innovative staffing arrangements and the maximising of the plant fleet help to reduce the cost of doing the work in the first place.
It has been said that "Council is not only about Roads, Rates and Rubbish anymore."
But to some people that is still the most important part.
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