‘Budget cuts will see longer delays in pothole repairs’
MORE potholes could appear on Bridgend county’s roads and take longer to repair if more budget cuts are made, councillors have been warned.
A report presented to members of Bridgend County Borough Council sets out how a £2.5m cut in the highways and transportation budget over the last five years has already seen a reduction in staff and service levels.
Mark Shephard, corporate director of communities, states that if this continues, roads will deteriorate at a quicker pace and it’ll take longer to make repairs.
In the report for the community, environment and leisure overview and scrutiny committee, which met last Thursday, he said that thanks to the Local Government Borrowing Initiative (LGBI), the authority had in- vested £6m between 2012 and 2015 in fitting 7,500 energy efficient LED street lights (around 37% of the county’s total street lights), made repairs to bridges and resurfaced roads.
But he said: “The ending of the LGBI investment programme linked with further budget reductions is likely to result in a deteriorating highway, which could be subject to an increased level of ad-hoc repair/patching on a risk basis.
“The rate at which this deterioration will occur is predicted to return to a pre-LGBI investment within 8-9 years.
“However, this prediction was considered against current levels of maintenance, and if these are impacted upon by fur- ther financial savings, the rate at which our roads deteriorate may significantly shorten this estimate.”
The report comes as Bridgend council has warned it will probably have to find another £37m of savings from its budget by 2020, on top of the £30m that has been cut over the last four years in line with reductions in the settlement from the Welsh Government.
Mr Shephard’s report repeats an earlier warning that this could lead to street lights being switched off.
The report states that money-saving proposals include “switching off significant amount of street lighting on residential estates, streets and towns”.
It could also mean the further loss of subsidised bus services resulting in “communities with no commercial or subsidised bus services”.
Mr Shephard said the authority has also cut one road gritter over the last few years, but the authority has measures in place to hire in extra equipment and staff in the event of severe weather.
He said a reduction in staff which remove overgrowth from pathways has already led to a backlog in the service of 200 jobs, which is around three month’s work.
Mr Shephard said further reductions in the annual £6.8m budget could lead to: a review of drainage maintenance, reduction of weed spraying to once a year, review of winter maintenance/ routes and increase levels of insurance claims and response times for completing repairs.