Plans to spend pots of money on road holes
ROCHDALE COUNCILLORS AGREE £12M MORE TO REPAIR POTHOLES ON 450 ROADS AND FOOTPATHS IN BOROUGH
TOWN hall chiefs are to spend £12m tackling potholes across Rochdale.
The cash boost has been approved by councillors and will see more than 350 roads and 100 footpaths repaired over the next two or three years.
Utility companies such as gas, electricity and water providers will also be barred from digging up newly-repaired roads unless they are carrying out emergency work.
The aim, council bosses say, is to make the borough’s roads the ‘best in Greater Manchester.’
The £12m is on top of the £800,000 the council will spend this year and next on specialist flood prevention measures, including the gully replacement programme.
And once government funding is taken into account, it will see £19m spent on the roads over next three years
Speaking before the meeting, council leader Allen Brett said: “We know that bread and butter issues, like the state of the roads, are really important to our residents.
“That’s why we’ve taken this step to enable us to drive through these massive improvements to our roads and footpaths. The full council will vote on whether to approve this spend next week and, if they agree, our highways team will start creating a hit list of roads and footpaths we would like to target, using information from network condition surveys and site visits, among other things.
“These lists will be put together with support from councillors across all the different wards who know their areas very well and are in regular contact with our many residents who use the roads and footpaths on a daily basis.” Work will start in summer 2018. A Department for Transport (DoT) spokeswoman told the M.E.N. last month that the government was investing a record £23bn in the roads, nationwide.
This includes £6bn up to 2021 for highways maintenance - to be topped up with £296m for potholes.
The spokeswoman said the DoT was giving Greater Manchester’s combined authority more than £1.4m from the pothole action fund this financial year enough to fix more than 26,000 defects.