Herefordshire’s current ten-million-pound road resurfacing programme “is having a dramatic effect on the county” yet will save it money over time, the leader of the county council has claimed.
Coun Jonathan Lester, Conservative group leader on Herefordshire Council, told fellow councillors that residents “expect to see road resurfacing which improves transport, health and safety and the way we move about, not just in cars”.
The programme “is spend-to-save”, he added, as without it, “you end up spending and wasting far more money in patching than you ever do in road resurfacing”.
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Responding to questions from previous council leader Coun David Hitchiner, Coun Lester defended the use of outside contractors to carry out much of the recent roadworks outside of its arrangement with its main public realm contractor Balfour Beatty, saying this “has been a very expedient and fleet-of-foot way of delivering a lot of road delivery”.
But Liberal Democrats group leader Coun Terry James said £10 million “won’t even keep up with the deterioration of roads in this county”.
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Meanwhile there is an “urgent need” to address the “accident blackspot” of the Lock’s Garage junction on the A465 southwest of Hereford, following a recent fatality there, Coun Matthew Engel said, warning that otherwise, “the council will be held responsible”.
Coun Lester replied: “We have doubled the money for road safety measures and will spend £3 million on three accident hotspots, one of them being Lock’s Garage.”
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On safety, Green councillor Toni Fagan called for “a speed reduction campaign throughout the county” saying this is “one of the biggest issues that comes to me as a rural councillor”.
Agreeing that speeding was also an issue in his similarly rural ward, Coun Lester said residents there “have put up speed indication devices, fences and gates to highlight the fact that this is a community where there’s a school”.
But referring to a series of recent decisions by officials not to lower speed limits as communities had requested, he said drivers “drive to the conditions of the road”, so by “artificially” reducing speed limits, “there’s a danger that you create an accident that you want to avoid”.
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