City of Ballarat delivers critical maintenance to wet-weather damaged roads

The City of Ballarat is adding additional crews as it works to deliver critical maintenance to roads damaged by heavy rainfall and flooding. 

Three additional road maintenance crews are working with the City of Ballarat’s sealed and unsealed roads maintenance teams to deliver works to repair local roads across the municipality. 

City of Ballarat data for 21-25 November shows more than 800 outstanding road maintenance jobs exist across the municipality – a 190 per cent increase on this time last year. 

Road maintenance includes potholes, edge breaks, corrugation and washouts, unsealed road grading, road shoulder and culvert maintenance, asphalt patching and drainage remediation works. 

Heavy rain and ongoing wet weather have contributed to the increase in the number of damaged roads while rain limits road crews to using short-term maintenance materials, such as cold mix, leading to repeated repairs of the same road defects. The City of Ballarat is working to source alternate repair methods to provide longer-term temporary repairs for prolonged periods of wet weather. 

Once the weather improves, City of Ballarat road crews will be able to significantly reduce the number of outstanding road maintenance jobs over the coming months, delivering longer-term road maintenance works. 

The City of Ballarat has developed a weekly road maintenance tracker for social media to keep the community informed of road maintenance progress. Each Tuesday for the foreseeable future, the tracker will report the number of road maintenance jobs completed, new job requests and the outstanding number of jobs. 

There is also a new interactive roadworks map available at ballarat.vic.gov.au/roadworks that shows the roads where road maintenance jobs have been completed in the previous six months, the roads where jobs are outstanding, and roads receiving and set to receive major programmed works. 

While the City of Ballarat conducts proactive road inspections leading to 75 per cent of road maintenance repairs, the community is also encouraged to report issues with local roads. The community can download the Snap Send Solve app to quickly report problems on our roads 24/7, visit forms.ballarat.vic.gov.au/ReportIssue or call Customer Service on 5320 5500. 

City of Ballarat Mayor Cr Des Hudson said road maintenance crews are working through a major backlog of works and are focused on prioritising road works for the safety of motorists. 

"Our road crews are working as quickly as possible to deliver safer and better roads for residents and visitors to our municipality,” he said. 

“While we have extra crews on hand to carry out critical road repairs, dry weather is the essential ingredient we need to complete our road maintenance and capital program works. 

“Our crews will work throughout the summer and autumn to repair and rebuild our roads returning them to the standard that the community expects.” 

The community is also encouraged to be kind to road maintenance crews who are working as quickly as possible to repair roads in wet conditions. 

The City of Ballarat’s 2022-2023 budget has a strong focus on road infrastructure.  

The budget includes $11.2 million in maintenance, which is an increase of $700,000, and $18.5 million in capital road works, including $3.8 million in Federal Government funding. These Federal Government grants will include Local Roads and Community Infrastructure, Blackspot and Roads to Recovery funding. 

The City of Ballarat is about to embark on a major $2.9 million blitz of major patching and asphalt overlays to target critical defects across the sealed road network. This includes the $2.1 million contract awarded to Boral Resources at the 23 November Council meeting. This contract will target 82 roads covering 29,110 square metres, as part of the capital works budget.  

The City of Ballarat also recently advertised for tender submissions for suitable contractors to fast-track additional road patching identified through recent proactive and reactive inspections following an extended period of wet weather. 

The annual reseal maintenance program will also reseal an additional 91 roads, covering 367,015 square metres. Maintenance repairs, including stabilisation patching, are now underway in preparation for contractor Primal Surfacing to commence in the coming weeks. 

The City of Ballarat maintains 1,093 kilometres of sealed roads and 382 kilometres of unsealed roads across the municipality. 

Not all roads are the responsibility of the City of Ballarat. While the City of Ballarat is responsible for local roads, VicRoads is the responsible authority for arterial roads.