Being Shovel-Ready for Grants

Glenda Kirk Director Infrastructure Services Mareeba Shire Council

It’s the first day of a new road construction project. The crew is rearing to go, grader and digger engines are purring, and the sun is shining but there’s one thing missing – the plans. A shiny white ute approaches from the east, weaves between the traffic cones, charges onto the work site and grinds to a halt beside the site supervisor. The ute window glides down and the engineer passes a set of plans to the supervisor. They’re still warm from the photocopier and the ink from her signature has barely dried. She drives away in a cloud of dust.

Alright, I’ve never actually done this however I have been on the receiving end of it, literally, and while this scenario is a bit dramatic, I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves scrambling to have designs ready in time. Whether it be designs for our own day labour crews or for tendering in the open market, there’s no denying that rushing the design process can lead to community dissatisfaction, frustrated construction staff, quality issues, time delays and cost blowouts.

While infrastructure is being hailed as the solution to Australia’s economic recovery through the COVID-19 pandemic, we are now being ‘called out’ by funding agencies, presumably after too many undercooked projects have failed, or worse, failed to even get off the ground.

The most recent round of grants offered under the Australian Government’s Building Better Regions Fund came as a shock to many of us. The key eligibility criteria for infrastructure projects centred around projects being “investment ready”, meaning construction would need to be able to commence within 12 weeks of executing the funding agreement with applicants required to provide evidence of having final designs and costings prepared, regulatory approvals in place and co-contributions guaranteed.

It’s likely we will see this type of requirement extend to other grant programs over the coming months and years. So how do we get ever ahead of the game?

Smaller councils in particular, struggle with being able to afford to develop designs for projects prior to being approved for funding. The community wants to see their money spent on the ground where they can see it, not on planning – which, ironically, is where we need it most. At the same time, we also struggle to design and construct projects within a single year as for many of us, the ideal construction weather occurs in the first six months of the financial year.

While we are yet to have an abundance of ‘shovel ready’ plans in the draw, Mareeba Shire Council embarked on a mission in 2019 to be better prepared for delivery of capital works projects through implementation of a Forward Design Program.

The Program was initially established by sacrificing around 10% of the capital works budget for upgrade of transport infrastructure and its purpose was to develop detailed designs for the following year’s transport program projects. The Forward Design Program is its own project within the capital works program,

allowing expenditure and progress to be tracked as per any other project.

Only around half of this modest budget was expended in the first year but the funds used were sufficient to ensure around a third of transport projects were fully designed and costed ahead of the following year’s budget adoption, with survey and investigation commenced for several others. This provided greater confidence in the scope and budget for those projects, which was welcomed by elected representatives.

The 10% reduction of physical work delivered under the transport program in that first year wasn’t particularly noticeable to the community. Since the costs expended for forward design are transferred to their respective projects at the commencement of the new financial year, the Forward Design Program is effectively replenished annually without further sacrificing program funding.

Council attempts to ensure that only high priority projects, likely to be funded in the upcoming budget are included in the Forward Design Program to ensure that we are making best use of the funding allocation. This is done through selecting projects that have funding committed under a longterm program eg Transport Infrastructure Development Scheme (TIDS) projects or Council’s 10-year asset management sub-plan for that particular asset class, or projects that have been assessed under Council’s Project Prioritisation Tool (PPT) as being top priority for funding consideration. Council’s executive management team also maintains oversight over projects and the associated design budget approved for funding under the Forward Design Program to ensure projects align with the Council’s priorities.

Each year, we improve a little bit more, and this year, Forward Design Programs will be introduced for Mareeba Shire Council’s Water and Wastewater capital budget recommendations. It is hoped that one day, the small sacrifices we make upfront will ensure our projects are better planned, grant-ready and deliver better outcomes for our communities.

NQ BRANCH CONFERENCE

MACKAY 10-11 May 2022

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH