Whatever Happened to that Extra £1m to Fix Potholes?
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Last January we were told there’d be £1m earmarked in the council tax increase to fix potholes. The article was here on Wrexham.com
Council Tax to go up by nearly 7% in Wrexham – with £1m specifically earmarked to fix potholes
Over a year later, councillors are still debating today how to deal with the pothole problem in Wrexham.
Was the £1m allocated into the Environment department specific for highways maintenance spent and were works actually carried out? If they were, has the pothole situation improved at all? or worsened over the past 12 months? Most people driving round Wrexham will attest that things have got worse.
The Council Tax Paying public and road users should be holding the council to extreme account on this issue.
If you follow the live feed notes of the meeting via the LDR, you’ll see some absolutely clueless comments by elected representatives.
Tuning into Wrexham Council's homes and environment scrutiny committee this afternoon. Today's hot topic is pot holes. You can also watch along here:https://t.co/AxtqTSNHNm
— Liam Randall (@LiamRandallLDR) February 18, 2021
My current favourites being of that:
*BEIRUT KLAXON* We have our first reference to potholes in a councillor’s ward as being “like Beirut”.
Nothing like a bit of comparison to warzone hyperbole to professionally get a point across as a public official.
Cllr Bates suggests residents should be able to maintain their own roads. No mention of how that would work.
It appears one councillor has forgotten that it is the councils’ responsibility to have all adopted roads maintained and in exchange, we all fork out a considerable amount of money in council tax each month.
You can just imagine how the roads would hold up if everyone had a bit of a DIY weekend filling their own potholes with whatever they fancied. I can’t possibly imagine anything going wrong with that!
At the end of the day, underinvestment and excuses regarding the sorry state of the roads in the county is a poor show if they want to attract more investment and prosperity to the area. A decent transport infrastructure, including quality roads is key.
The Chief Officer Darren Williams completely dismissed out of hand the new JCB machine that fixes potholes in 8 minutes and can increase road repairs by up to 700% quicker.
These machines can be leased for only £600 a week! Out of a budget of £1m for extra repair, spending some money leasing 4 of them for a period of 10 weeks or something during the summer when the weather is best would help absolutely blitz them. That’s a cost of just £24,000.
If you are getting them repaired that much quicker then money is saved in per hour labour wages on average required to fix each hole. No brainer to me. A slowly fixed hole is an expensively and inefficiently fixed hole.
Why fix it properly when you can just change your own policy to reduce the number of repairs?
This keeps the insurers happy because they only have to pay out when the council don’t comply with their own rules.
Don’t worry help is at hand I have just had a leaflet promising massive investment in Welsh roads ! The same Tory leaflet promises a freeze on our council tax!
Leaving aside the fact that our Tory/Independent councillors have just done that there is no explanation as to what budget cuts they would enact to achieve this nirvana ! Fantasy politics!What was Darren Williams reasoning behind dismissing using the JCB machine? For £600 pounds it would be worthwhile hiring one for a week and trying it out to see really does do the job as well as JCB say. Could be another case of Wrexham lagging behind and sticking to the old ways and not embracing new technology.
Hardly surprising when Labour only seem to increase settlement to Labour run Council’s, basically down south. Interesting to see how Council tax could be frozen though. One can assume a Welsh Conservative government will give more to us peasants up north? Won’t hold my breath!
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