Council up against it to spend €600k on roads in six weeks
SLIGO County Council has received funding of €600,000 to assist in the repair of regional and local roads damaged by severe weather events.
The funding has been made available by Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross with the stipulation that the works have to be done by the end of next month.
Sligo County Council’s Director of Services Tom Kilfeather said:“The works carried out will be structural overlay works which can be done at this time of year. Nevertheless, the delivery of this additional block of work within the next six weeks is a challenging one.”
All Local Authorities received a request from the Department in the middle of October to consider submitting a request for funding setting out details of storm damaged roads identified as priority for repair in the event of funding becoming available.
Local Authorities were advised clearly that a pre-requisite to any funding allocation would be a firm commitment that all works would be completed before 30 th November.
On Monday 15 th October Sligo County Council submitted a Priority List to the Department, identifying 23 roads with an estimated cost to repair of €1,382,850.
The funding has been welcomed by Cllr Marie Casserly who said councillors have been asking for various tranches of extra funding for local and regional roads.
“Storm damaged roads identified as priority for repair. There are more roads around the county in need of serious attention and hopefully more funding will be made available for those roads in 2019.
“Well done to Tom Brennan senior engineer and all the roads staff Sligo County Council for getting this application turned around in a short time frame. Sligo County Council has received more roads funding in 2018 than any other year to date,” she said.