The Hills Shire Council has approved additional funds for its road maintenance and renewals budget, making this year’s budget its biggest yet.
Council says its road asset maintenance and renewal budget will increase by $1.7 million to carry out urgent repairs and tackle the growing number of potholes across various Hills Shire roads which were created by the recent record-breaking wet weather.
“With our third consecutive La Nina, it has been a very wet few years – and all across NSW, this is causing a deterioration in the quality of the road network,” said Mayor, Peter Gangemi (pictured).
“Council has allocated an increased budget to repair our road network to a high standard and our crews are working hard to respond to requests to repair potholes and road damage.
“We are aware that road condition is a top priority in our Shire right now and we are doing everything we can to repair roads as fast as possible.”
Requests to Council for pothole repairs have increased over the past three years, the Mayor said. In 2019, Council received 1,680 calls to fix potholes and carry out road patching work. This has now grown to 4783 requests in 2022 – and the year has two months to go, he said.
“This represents a 185% increase, which is just phenomenal.”
“We are working to attend to all requests, but there are roads that still require attention, particularly in our rural north, which have been impacted by multiple floods over the past two years.
“Council is attending to these roads, however, some will require significant work to repair the damage that was caused by these natural disasters,” he said.
Mayor Gangemi said Council will make a submission to the joint Australian Government State Disaster Recovery Funding grant program to try and recover costs directly attributed to these floods.
In addition to this, Council successfully secured $458,071 under Transport for NSW’s Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangement to carryout rehabilitation and drainage improvement works on Halcrows Road, in Cattai after it sustained damage when it was used as a detour road in the July 2022 flood. Council has also committed approximately $292,000 to this project and is working with contractors to find the best solution to fix this road as soon as possible.
