Monaghan roads team has the 'expertise and equipment'

Roads was the main issue discussed at the most recent meeting of the Clones-Ballybay Municipal District.

A report by the county’s Executive Engineer, Craig Connolly, outlined all the projects planned or ongoing in the west Monaghan MD, which include 11 roads for resurfacing. Of those, 10 are local and one is a regional road.

Senior Roads Engineer Kevin West attended the meeting when he explained a programme of patching works to be carried out in the area.

The engineer’s report noted the MD has two patching crews working right up until December 23 and advised that any road requiring patch repairs should typically be reported to the MD and logged on the Defects App prior to patching.

Cllr Pat Treanor (SF) said he wanted even roads with few residents to be considered for re-surfacing or repair work if required.

“It should not be a case of ‘no-one lives on that road, we’ll just leave it,’” Cllr Treanor said, “Those roads are used to connect farms, people and businesses.”

Cllr Sean Gilliland (FG) welcomed the Executive Engineer’s report and highlighted how the Castleblayney-Carrickmacross MD got “more bang for their buck” with their choice of stone roads dressing. However, he understood this “deteriorated a lot quicker”.

“If we’re doing double-surface dressing, is it going to last as long as say, 100mm of black top?” Cllr Gilliland asked. “We don’t want to end up in the same predicament in two to three years’ time.”

The Lough Egish rep said the council’s patching initiative was “good” but queried if a road listed as category 4 or below (making it a priority for repair or resurfacing) is patched, would that road then be taken off the priority list for a full resurfacing job?

Cllr Gilliland also asked what happens when the surface dressing crew is out and when the members look for other work to be done.

“Are we going to sub-contract out? Do we have capacity to do that?” the councillor asked of the county’s senior roads engineer, Kevin West.

Responding to each of Cllr Gilliand’s queries, Kevin West said:

“Traffic surveys are only used to determine the loading on roads, traffic volumes, the number of HGVs and help with determining what’s the loading capacity on roads."

He said that the Carrick-Blayney MD was aware of the issues from the early to mid-noughties. "We went further into the analysis and found that a lot of tertiary local roads are not as bad as first thought.

“Local primary and local secondary roads had a lot more traffic and they didn’t hold up as well.

“The most a road is going to sit without an analysis of it is five years,” the engineer assured the members, “and even a stone surface won’t deteriorate in five years.”

On the issue of sub-contracting roadworks, Mr West conceded “there is a union issue to do with outsourcing".

He said the expertise, however, is in the local authority.

“Our lads do take pride in their work,” the engineer for County Monaghan said: “They would regularly ask ‘how’s that road bearing up?’. Mr West also pointed to the fact the county council has spent €1M in equipment including two new rollers.

“We have the best equipment in the country, without a shadow of a doubt,” he said before adding: “We really don’t want to lose that local expertise.

We are confident we have the expertise and equipment and, if we don’t, then we’ll look to outsource.

One benefit of outsourcing roadworks is that “any intervention or innovation would be the responsibility of the contractor", Mr West explained.

Councillor Richard Truell (FG) said roads are “the biggest issue in this MD” and described as “good news” the patching and resurfacing scheme planned for the coming year.

The councillor from Newbliss asked the engineer how many roads his team will get done under the proposed resurfacing scheme.

Kevin West said how many “depends on the length, width etc of a road but I can tell you in square metres, there will be a 20 to 30 per cent increase".

Cathaoirleach of Clones-Ballybay MD, Sinéad Flynn (SF) closed the discussion on roads by saying: “The more roads we get done the better.”