Brett Ireland became the mayor of the Hindmarsh Shire Council last November, just weeks after Victoria's extreme flood events which devastated small regional towns across southeastern Australia.
The October 2022 flooding event in Australia was particularly damaging for regional roads which were already desecrated and it appears nearly nine months later, ratepayers in one regional Victorian LGA are still lamenting roads that are littered with potholes and unloading their frustration onto the council.
Ireland appeared on Flow FM's Country Viewpoint program this week and revealed staff at the Hindmarsh Shire Council were subjected to scathing remarks from residents off the back of community satisfaction surveys.
"When the community satisfaction surveys came back, there was a lot of angst there and the one lady in the council said, 'I really don't want to go to work', because she said they try so hard. It was, yes, some really derogatory comments," Ireland said.
Ireland expressed that he wasn't particularly sure how to satisfy the chorus of disapproval on the subject of potholes, informing listeners that the council aims to be as transparent and accessible as it can be.
"Maybe we don't have meetings at night and things like that, we send everybody a survey but that might just be a forum to pot shot as well, we have forms they can go in and fill in on the council website, we have a great newsletter that gives them a lot of information every two weeks," Ireland exclaimed.
"In my Mayoral Matters columns, I try to give a lot of factual information, I like the idea of people knowing what's going on - that's sort of one of my real strong briefs, a real passion of mine."
Ireland provided context as to the precise situation that his council is currently dealing with when it comes to roads in the jurisdiction that are filled with potholes.
"We had a very wet season last year and if you don't need a pothole at least once a day, you're probably not in a car, but the roads have been, they're not where we want them to be and the funding is obviously restrictive in that," said Ireland.
"We only get a certain amount of funding and when that big rain event came, we had to drag road crews doing capital improvements off those projects and put them to just reparation like repairing roads and that made it very awkward."
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