Wollondilly Council’s Shire-wide roadworks blitz is getting results, particularly thanks to a massive heavy patching program this year, made possible thanks to $9.5M of road repair funding from the State Government’s Regional and Local Roads Repair Program.

In just six months, over 52,000m² of heavy patching has been completed on high priority roads all across the Shire, which equates to 17km of a single lane of road. Almost 34km of drainage has also been completed and 38km of unsealed roads have been graded.

This is in addition to Council’s $22M investment in roads maintenance and reconstruction program in the last financial year.

The funding was announced in January 2023 to help address the significant flood damage across Wollondilly’s 890km road network in recent years. With only 12 months to deliver, Council had to hit the ground running to make the funding work for the community.

Mayor Matt Gould said, “Council hit the ground running when the funding was announced as we had already conducted an assessment of the road network and priority areas for heavy patching, unsealed road grading and drainage works after the series of extreme weather events in 2022.”

“Funding had been diverted from the Capital Works Program to start making headway to fix up the most critical sections of roads, prior to the funding announcement.”

“This put Wollondilly in a great position to be able to get this funding working for us and ramp up the heavy patching program, with some major improvements now achieved on roads including Silverdale Road, Thirlmere Way and Menangle Road, as well as Bronzewing Street, Scroggies Road and Macquariedale Road.”

“Our staff have worked extremely hard to maximise the works we have delivered with the money we have.”

“Unfortunately, the $9.5M won't fix everything that needs fixing and there is still a lot more work to do, but the efforts of the Infrastructure Operations team and their efforts to get the job done have put us in a much better position and we are continuing to work to address the impacts of historical underspending on our roads through a record investment in our Capital Works Program.”

Council has already spent approximately 75% of the funds which have improved driving conditions on numerous roads within the Shire.