Road upgrades postponed due to funding cuts

SURFACE upgrade and strengthening work on between 100 and 120 kilometres of roads throughout Clare will have to be postponed following a €450,000 reduction in funding from the Department of the Environment.
Senior executive engineer, Tom Tiernan has also revealed the council will have to reassess all the damage caused by the frost and flood damage in recent months to establish a priority list after the department allocated over €8 million for restoration works even though the total damage for non-national roads in the county is €9.5 million.
Expressing disappointment with the overall allocation of €15.6 million, Mr Tiernan confirmed that this represented a cutback of almost 3% and acknowledged it would be difficult to maintain roads to the standard the council required.
The only silver lining in the allocation was the increased flexibility the department will allow the council in the way it uses all of its resources on road improvement works.
The only national roads project at the moment is the Gort to Crusheen Bypass and it is expected most of the work should be completed by the end of this year.
The county council currently employs about 200 to maintain and improve roads in the county including engineers, outdoor workers, lorry drivers and supervisors.
Mr Tiernan expects that the local authority should have the required manpower to carry out the mammoth road repair job in the county. 
Clare County Council has costed the repair bill as follows: national roads flood damage,    €630,000; non-national flood damage, €2,352,000; national roads frost damage, €1.022 million and non-national roads frost damage, €7.084 million; adding to a total of €11,088 million.
Tom Tiernan has revealed that the total contribution from the council’s own resources and the National Roads Authority for the 2010 Roadworks Programme is € 7 million.
Government cutbacks in the allocation of funding for roads resulted in a 30% drop in the overall package for maintenance and improvement works on the county’s roads from €31 million in 2008 to €22 million in 2009.
The fact that the total repair bill is half of the overall allocation for 2009 illustrates the huge task facing the council to try and maintain roads to an acceptable level and at the same time restore the damaged ones to the state they were in at the start of last November.