MRCA submission to Snowy Monaro Regional Council on roads funding
Dear CEO, Mayor and Councillors
The Michelago community wishes to loudly and firmly state its opposition to the Council’s plan to stop maintaining our roads.
We are confused. Council has decided to apply daily usage rate thresholds to one service only – roads, which are an essential service. This is not equitable or rational. Usage rate thresholds should apply to all non-essential services.
In the Michelago region, most of our local roads are likely to be affected by the 35/150 usage rate thresholds. The budget documents state that unsealed roads with less than 35 cars per day and sealed roads with less than 150 cars per day will no longer be maintained. The Operational Plan 2024-25 on page 25 specifically rules out reactive maintenance to fix dangerous problems that arise on these roads.
Rural families have used these roads for generations and successive local governments have graded and repaired them. Small communities have grown up around these local roads that Council proposes to abandon. Michelago’s population continues to grow as people have bought properties and built homes in good faith along these little roads in the belief that they would continue to be maintained by local government. Now that Council has announced its intention to defund minor roads, people are already pulling out of property purchases in the Michelago region.
Roads are not an optional service to be provided only in the good times. They are critical infrastructure. When a storm makes a road impassable, Council must repair it, otherwise residents will have no option but to fix the road themselves, potentially exposing them to legal liability.
People need good roads to drive to town to get food and medicines; for children to go to school; for the sick and infirm to visit doctors and hospitals; for farmers to deliver produce to market; and for people to get to work. Without good roads how do tradies and their utes get to your house to fix your plumbing or electricals? How does the RFS respond to a fire emergency? How does the ambulance take you to hospital?
Many other local government services are not critical or could be more efficiently delivered by private operators. For example, Snowy Monaro has:
- Six caravan parks
- Five swimming pools – with $5 million budgeted for upgrades!
- Four Council offices (for one amalgamated Council)
- Three public libraries
- Two visitor information centres
- Two saleyards.
Are they as necessary as an ambulance or the fire brigade?
If this is indeed a budget emergency that justifies abandoning roads, then Council should be pursuing significant savings by:
- Selling all caravan parks and saleyards to private operators
- Closing swimming pools which fail to meet usage rate thresholds until the budget crisis is over
- Outdoor pools with less than 35 users per day
- Indoor pools with less than 150 users per day
- Closing three of the four Council offices and selling off these buildings
- Closing the two existing visitor information centres and improving online information (tourists get all their information and do bookings online)
- Consolidating frontline service delivery into ‘Council Shopfronts’ which could be set up in the public libraries – assuming the libraries meet appropriate usage rate thresholds (such as 35 users per day in small towns and 150 users per day in large towns)
- Selling off all surplus Council land and buildings.
I implore Council to consider these alternatives to the current proposal to effectively close rural roads and deny critical services to so many of Snowy Monaro’s rural residents.
Yours sincerely
Kerry Rooney, Treasurer – Michelago Region Community Association
31 May 2024
Please refer to Table 1 Michelago Roads in the Attachment. Residents want to know which of these roads Council intends to abandon.
Table 2 in the Attachment uses the latest ABS 2021 Census data to show the importance of road transport for employment to the villages/towns in this region.
