THE state of roads in north-west Victoria is of “major concern” and greater government funding is urgently needed to fix the problem, according to Mildura infrastructure and assets portfolio councillor Glenn Milne.
Councillors have been told there is a gap between available funding and what needs to be spent in the municipality to maintain and address deficient roads.
Mildura attracts up to $5 million in state and federal road funding in any given year, however that still does not close the funding gap.
In a memo sent to councillors this month, development general manager Mandy Whelan said that in the past five years there had been 280 serious crashes resulting in seven people being killed, 69 sustaining serious injury and 284 sustaining other injuries on Mildura Council-managed roads.
Ms Whelan said an RACV report titled Have Your Say on Regional Victoria’s Most Dangerous Roads estimated that 80 per cent of the 180,000km of regional roads with 100km/h speed limits in Victoria needed upgrading.
She said that of those, the report named Seventeenth Street, from Etiwanda Avenue to River Avenue, as the only road identified within the municipality.
Reducing some road speed limits is an option being explored in order to deal with the issue and reduce the overall upgrade costs.
Cr Milne said councils wanted to see a greater spend in the regions “and the sooner the better”.
“Long-term, unless there’s some pretty serious funding put into roads, you can see that the cost of maintaining them across small council areas like ours eventually is going to overcome the resources and the ability of a council to respond,” he said.
“And it needs to be done fairly quickly because, as the years go by, that cost multiplies exponentially.”
Cr Milne said governments should also consider funding on a municipality-by-municipality basis.
“I know governments try to be fair to each municipality, but they really do have to start looking at what each council is responsible for because some have got far greater responsibility than others and we’re one of those.
“We rely on transport and we rely on that road system greatly for our future, for our income, for everything we make and grow, et cetera, so it’s not something we can kind of do without.
“And you don’t want to knock the speed limits down because then you have got slower transport that are slower to market and part of our growth in farming output is our ability to get goods to market on time, every time.”
