Sinn Féin Councillor Conor D. McGuinness has said that Waterford City and County Council is being forced to ‘throw good money after bad’ on costly roads repairs due to Government cuts to the local authority’s annual roads maintenance budget.
Cllr. McGuinness said:
“The roads network in West Waterford is in a very poor state of repair, despite the best efforts of the Council’s engineers and staff.
“The annual roads budgets allocated to Waterford has been hit with effective cuts over the past number of years, due to the inflexibility of Government and their inability to factor in the very real inflation impacting materials, machinery and energy costs.
“The programme for Government agreed by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party ensured that rural roads would be seen as the poor relation when it comes to funding.
“Money for roads maintenance and upgrades comes from central Government via the Department of Transport. The three parties signed up to a regime where our network of regional and local roads would be sent to the back of the line.
“Council engineers have said publicly that the local authority is getting less than half the funding necessary to maintain the roads network to the minimum acceptable standard.
“The outworking of this is that the Council is forced to spend money on temporary fixes like filling potholes rather than doing proper resurfacing and strengthening jobs that will last. While these jobs require a greater financial outlay, they pay for themselves over time. There is nothing economical about filling potholes, only for them to reappear weeks later, however this is exactly the corner that local authorities including Waterford, have been forced into by this coalition.
Conor D. McGuinness TD 