WENTWORTH Mayor Melisa Hederics says confirmation of additional funding to complete the sealing of the Pooncarie Road to Menindee will be game changing for tourism in south-west New South Wales.
The Central Darling Shire had already secured $25 million from the Federal and New South Wales governments to seal 70km of the road within that municipality, leaving 26 kilometres of dirt road within Wentworth Shire to Pooncarie unfunded before this week’s announcement.
However, the $9.2 million investment — shared equally between the federal and state governments — is expected to begin in the first half of next year and be finished by mid-2022.
Cr Hederics said that while the finalisation of the project had been a long time coming, the region should be able to realise a positive outcome as a result.
“It will be fantastic for tourism, fantastic for our community at Pooncarie … the whole lot,” Cr Hederics said.
“The whole idea of sealing it was that tourism link so visitors are not going straight up the highway to Broken Hill,” she said.
“People will be able to to tow a caravan around there and it just opens up the whole tourism side of things and it might make it more inviting for people to come this way, including another avenue into Mungo.
“For the Darling River region, towns like Pooncarie and Menindee are going to have tourists coming in and maybe they will stop at the Pooncarie Caravan Park or maybe they will stop at Menindee or Copi Hollow or the likes.
“It’s fantastic for the tourism side of things and absolutely amazing for those little towns out there.”
Cr Hederics said there had been much behind-the-scenes work done over many years to get the road sealed.
“There’s been a lot of advocating, a lot of pushing and when the announcement was made that the road from Menindee to our shire border side was going to be sealed, that was a bit of a disappointment,” she said.
“But it was probably a good stepping stone for us to go in there and say ‘well, there’s no point sealing Menindee to the shire border, you might as well do the whole lot’ because it would really be a lost cause if that was still dirt.”
Cr Hederics said the works in the Wentworth Shire were “shovel ready to go” and, when complete, would provide a real benefit to shire residents, .
“As soon as you get a drop of rain on those roads we’ve got to go and close them, we’ve got to prepare them and we’ve got to grade them,” she said.
“So to make it sealed and be able to travel there at any given time, that’s huge.
“These bitumen roads are going to need maintaining, but probably not as often as a dirt road is going to need grading.
“Even dirt roads need grading when there’s no rain and dry grading is hard and when there’s no water out there you can’t touch a road and they then become unsafe.”
