Engineers in Tipperary County Council have shut down proposals to change the operation of CIS locally.
The Community Involvement Scheme is an initiative which sees members of the public contribute 10% of the money towards the improvement of a public tertiary road while Government pays 90%.
Fine Gael’s Mark Fitzgerald believes there is good buy-in to the scheme as it allows roads to get done the council will never get around to, but, he feels there are still issues when it comes to longer stretches of road.
He suggested that engineers could include 3 to 4km of these bigger roads in the next roads programme on the condition the community would fund the remainder.
However, he was told changing the format of the scheme was not something they would consider.
“We have a very severe road over around the mountain at Slievenamon we don’t have the funding or the means to do the whole 14/15km of the road and there are numerous houses on the road. Maybe if we approached some the residents and said we’ll do a CIS application on some of the road and got buy in from some of residents and then the rest of road would be done by the council, and that was my kinda thinking. In an ideal world that would workable but obviously you have a lot of mitigating factors that can make that more complicated and I think that is what the engineers were suggesting to me.”
He is also concerned that many roads in Tipperary will fail before they ever make it onto a roads programme.
The legacy issue with regards our infrastructure means many councils are merely firefighting at this point.
He feels there needs to be something done to stop local roads failing.
“That has become a legacy issue now because it has become so hard to keep on top of and maintain. Especially your secondary and tertiary roads in a lot of rural areas, councils are only getting around to them every 40 or 50 years so unless the roads are done to a high standard they are going to fade away before the council gets back around to them. And that’s no fault of the council either the engineers work the best they can with the budget they have. The budget for example for Carrick Municipal District like you might get 10 to 20 km of road done in a year.”
