Suburbs in road funding wrestle
THE first gunshots are being fired in a civil war on the Gold Coast. This is about road funding. A fight between the north, south and west. Will your suburb win?
At a recent special budget meeting behind closed doors at Evandale, councillors began debating the new Isle of Capri bridge. This upgrade is critical to east-west links to Surfers Paradise.
A new $34 million bridge will run parallel to the existing one, feature two lanes and a shared path for cyclists and pedestrians. It will ease gridlock on Chevron Island.
Your columnist understands Deputy Mayor Donna Gates spoke strongly in favour of the city’s north getting more road funding.
Remember the Bulletin video showing motorists waiting 23 minutes at Pimpama to travel 150m to access council’s Yalwalpah Rd to link southbound with the M1?
Back in May last year, Mayor Tom Tate announced councillors had backed the second Isle of Capri bridge, with construction planned to start in 2019 and be completed by 2021.
The critical political factor here is area councillor Gary Baildon. He is not among the five councillors in the so-called doghouse at Evandale.
Cr Baildon supports the Mayor and remains in the “leadership group”. His loyalty no doubt contributed to the council in last week’s budget signing off on $14 million for the bridge duplication design.
But ratepayers need to know that is where the funding ends. This is where the real debate begins.
The Mayor’s plan was for the bridge to be built from the sale of the ratepayer-owned Bruce Bishop Carpark in central Surfers Paradise.
The powerful Save Surfers Paradise group, a mix of lawyers, other professionals and a retired judge, is fighting that sale in the Supreme Court in Brisbane.
The council is proceeding with the sale. Given the publicity about the court case, there are rumours about just how many bidders are out there and what they intend to offer.
Only one reasonable conclusion can be reached at this point. An announcement of a sale is not expected soon. The council will, if necessary, fund the bridge upgrade.
Asked if the carpark sale was critical to the funding mix, the Mayor replied: “No, it’s not critical, it just means it’s delayed.
“You have to weigh up what people want. Higher rates or affordable rates. I go the side of affordable rates so you can only spend what you’ve got.
“Then there is competing other roadworks in other parts of the city by other councillors – to spend all that money on one bridge, they could say ‘well, wait a minute, it’s a bit hard’. So it will be delayed.”
A councillor has gone public about the road funding debate. Hinterland-based councillor Glenn Tozer posted some calculations on his Facebook page.
He looked at the council’s capital works investment into the road network in this year’s council budget as a proportion of the total capital works program.
What he found was the increase only rises in line with the growth of the city.
The proportion for road works in the past four years has hovered around 29 per cent after dropping to 27.5 per cent in 2017-18.
Cr Tozer believes after the city hit the pause button on road works that were preventing traffic being gridlocked during the Games, it should have again pressed fast forward.
He has spoken to his residents and their response is the council should be in traffic congestion-buster mode, improving the roads linked to the Pacific Motorway.
“We can do more and we should do more. For the record, the community consultation delivered across the whole city supports this view too,” he posted.
What happens next, where priority funding goes – a lot of it will depend on who barks the loudest and most effectively at City Hall, from inside or outside the doghouse.