Moffee for Breakfast

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RESPONSE FROM MICK RABY:

The short answer to your question is that this project is being rescheduled for a July 2021 start date. I have attached a drawing for anyone who is interested. You might put it out on Facebook.

As a rule Council obviously plans to deliver as many Capital Projects each year as we have people to design and build them. In any ‘normal’ year we go pretty well against that target. However the Combine/Azalea project obviously falls outside of that target so I feel I should provide some reasoning for that outcome.

The reason behind the rescheduling of the project (and some other projects which have also been rescheduled for the same reasons) is that the past 12 months have proved to be, to put it politely, a ‘most challenging time’ for the delivery teams at Council.

Disaster recovery efforts from both the 2019 bushfires and the February 2020 flood (which actually caused more damage than the bushfires) were both still underway during the first financial quarter (Jul-Sept 20) of the current delivery year. Approximately $5m-$6m in State and Federal disaster recovery funding was ultimately, and gratefully, accessed by the Coffs community (a sincere thank you to both Gurmesh Singh and Pat Conaghan for their efforts in that regard). But at the same time a significant level of Council’s internal delivery resources were naturally redirected and expended on completing that important work and were therefore not available for the planned capital program works (projects such as Combine/Azalea Roundabout for example) for a significant period of the first quarter this year.

To add to that, almost 60% of available work days between July 2020 and February 2021 were rain-affected which of course slowed down most of our civil work projects. In the same period there have been another three Natural Disaster Declarations for floods within the Coffs LGA - 19th Dec 2020; 23rd Feb 2021; and 10th Mar 2021, which consumed more of our delivery resources which again had to, quite naturally, be redeployed for the more urgent disaster recovery works. The good news is that all of that work, with the exception of the most recent Corindi/Sherwood Creek event, has now been completed. The bad news is that some projects had to slide off the program.

In summary, the delivery of the planned 20/21 capital works program was ‘somewhat compromised’ and as a consequence the delivery of the Azalea/Combine Roundabout will start three months after its due date.

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