Council may resolved to reallocate savings to Guyra's main street upgrade

At its Monthly Ordinary Meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Armidale regional Council decided against requesting the NSW Government redirect the total amount of grant funding savings worth $852,121 to the Guyra Main Street Upgrade.

After a long debate, it was resolved the $159,137 of funding for Kempsey Road remain available for works there, and the $362,211 savings for the Rockvale Road Upgrade also be spent on that project.

Council will now request the redirection of $330,773 to the Guyra Main Street Upgrade.

SO FAR:

Armidale regional Councillors will debate if the tidy sum of $852,121 worth of grant funding savings will be redirected to Guyra's Main Street Upgrade at Wednesday's Ordinary Monthly Meeting.

These savings were made from the $15 million merger funding ($10 million from the Stronger Communities Fund and $5 million from New Council Implementation Fund) provided in May 2016.

Wednesday's recommendation is for council to note the current status of the projects funded by the SCF and NCIF, and apply to the NSW Government to redirect savings from Platform Road ($320,344), Kempsey Road improvements ($159,137), Central Park Armidale ($10,429) and Rockvale Road ($362,211) to the Guyra Main Street Upgrade.

ALSO READ:

Mayor Simon Murray described the amounts these amounts as leftovers and said he wanted to be clear about where this funding was coming from.

"For example, this is the savings from the money we put into the top part of Kempsey Road. It's not part of that $4.6 million that we've got for doing the Big Hill," he said.

"The money was allocated to the top bitumen section."

Council had until June next year to spend its funding on these four projects, which have been completed ahead of budget, leaving council with extra funding it cannot spend on anything else without the NSW Government's approval.

Cr Murray said he considered the funding would be going to the right project should it be redirected to the main street of Guyra.

"The Guyra community was promised a new main street ever since the administrator was running the council, so we're going back to 2017," Cr Murray said.

"And really, apart from digging the tanks out, the community hasn't seen anything being done for that $2.7 million that was allocated.

"This will go some way to rectifying that because we had to spend a fair bit of money on planning and removal of the tanks and remediation of the soil."

Cr Murray said the Guyra Main Street Upgrade was a project that would potentially take a couple of years to finish.

He thought if Councillors adopted this resolution and the government approved council's request, then the injection of funding would go a long way to getting the project up to a better standard than originally planned and that was good for the region.