Urgent action demanded for roads

Palmerston North’s roads are cracking up faster than money and contractors can get ahead of the problems.

City councillors at Wednesday’s infrastructure committee vented their frustration about the intensity of complaints they are receiving from residents.

Councillor Lorna Johnson said roading was the number one issue people raised with her and they were shouting about it.

Councillors have called for an urgent round table meeting with contractors Fulton Hogan and an independent review of how the contract is working in the search for solutions.

Mayor Grant Smith said he was at a loss to understand why the roading network had deteriorated so much in the past year or two.

“I have to say I am not satisfied,’’ Smith said.

‘‘There is quite a lot of dissatisfaction out there and we are getting slammed.

“What we are currently doing is not working. We can do better.”

The demand for improvements was prompted by a sixmonthly report on the $38 million, three-year roading maintenance contract, presented by the council’s group manager for transport and development,

Hamish Featonby, and Fulton Hogan general manager for the lower North Island Blair Gregory.

The report included what councillor Brent Barrett described as ‘‘the unvarnished truth’’ about the state of the roads, the extent of the challenge to fix them, and the inadequacy of the budget to do so.

In the 2020/21 year, 2500 potholes had been repaired at 1060 locations. Some 21km of roads were resealed and $1.5m was spent on road repairs to fix some of the worst cases of pavement breakdowns.

But still, the council was receiving an average of 24 complaints every day about faults such as potholes.

Featonby said that while potholes could be fixed reasonably cheaply and easily, the repairs did not last, and where clusters appeared, deeper rebuilding was needed, at costs upwards of $1 million depending on the length of the stretch to be done.

Known problem areas such as Vogel St, which was carrying many more trucks than it was designed for, were not expected to rise to the top of the priority list for major repairs for three to five years. Featonby said the budget was not enough to get ahead of problems and needed to be increased by about 50%.

Staff were working on a programme to put to Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency in a year’s time in the hope of getting approval and more subsidies to accelerate efforts to ‘‘bring the network up to speed’’.