THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISING WAGGA WAGGA CITY publication COUNCIL CouncilFEATURE News - ABY Wagga Wagga City Council
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Wagga Wagga City Council weekly newsletter
Saturday 29 October 2022 | Issue #419
Potholes: "a statewide issue"
Council
Council welcomes NSW Government funding initiative to fix potholes PATCHING WORK: Council’s civil works machinery and crews continue to work overtime and on weekends to repair road damage resulting from the prolonged wet weather. Community
CONNECTING OUR COMMUNITY: Attendees from the Tech Savvy Communities Dari-speaking group (from left), Thom Paton of the Multicultural Council of Wagga Wagga, Tech Savvy Dari Trainer Hakimeh Rahimi, Zahra Afkari, Tech Savvy Dari Trainer Azizeh Abbasi, Zeinab Abbasi, Raziyeh Khademi and Moharam Ali Abbasi. Library Services Team Leader Michael Library program ensuring Scutti said the program covers a wide our multicultural range of topics, from using email and communities stay connected social media, to accessing government services online and staying cyber safe. Wagga Wagga City Library “The relevance of our program has is supporting residents from grown in recent times as the move culturally and linguistically diverse to online services in all spheres of life communities to navigate the world dramatically increases,” Mr Scutti said. of modern technology through its “This is particularly acute in regional successful Tech Savvy Communities communities like ours where access to program. some services is exclusively online.” The Tech Savvy Communities program Tech Savvy Communities participants is empowering speakers of diverse are also encouraged to stay connected languages to increase their digital skills with library services such as the and literacy, build confidence, and Language Cafe and Community reduce social isolation within their Language collection, further expanding communities, with all classes delivered their network and ability to participate in in their first language.
civic life. According to the State Library of NSW, Wagga Wagga City Library was the first library outside of the Sydney metropolitan area to offer Tech Savvy classes in languages other than English. To date the program has offered classes in Arabic, Burmese, Dari, Kurmanji, and Tibetan. Michael Scutti said the Tech Savvy Communities program, which is funded by the State Library of NSW and Telstra, has created meaningful employment for the five community trainers who delivered the program over the last 12 months. “We were very fortunate to partner with the Australian Red Cross Wagga Wagga and the Multicultural Council of Wagga Wagga who put us in touch with some wonderful community trainers,” Mr Scutti said. “Through being part of this program, several community trainers experienced paid employment in Australia for the first time. Their enthusiasm and commitment to helping their communities is inspiring.” Burmese language trainer Lat Aung Nang Hee spoke of the positive impact the program had on the lives of attendees. “Most of the participants have never had access to IT classes, so it’s a new experience,” Mr Nang Hee said. “They can now apply what they learn in class to their everyday lives.” For more information about Wagga Wagga City Library’s tech savvy classes and multicultural services, visit waggalibrary.com.au
Tucked into some pizza for dinner? Did you know you can put your pizza boxes, including any leftover slices, in the green lid FOGO bin?
To learn more visit: wagga.nsw.gov.au/householdwaste
Wagga Wagga City Council will seek funding to address its highest priority pothole repairs under the new $50 million Fixing Local Roads Pothole Repair Round, announced by the NSW Government earlier this week. The funding is available to 95 regional and rural councils across the state to repair the estimated 420,000-plus potholes on local and regional roads. Council’s Director Infrastructure Services Warren Faulkner said the funding announcement was recognition that potholes are a state-wide issue, resulting from this year’s prolonged and extreme wet weather events. “If Council is successful in its application, we will consider engaging extra resources to help respond to the deterioration of our 2,288km road network,” Mr Faulkner said. “Since these unprecedent weather conditions began, we have been allocating resources to working on defects across the Local Government Area, with our patching teams working overtime and on weekends. “Unfortunately, the wet conditions mean that the repairs are occurring in conditions that are less than ideal, so they are a short-term fix until the pavement and ground has a chance to dry out. “At the moment, the short sunny periods are not generating enough warmth to dry the pavements out and ensure the temporary patches are reasonably resilient, however we will continue to fill the potholes for safety reasons.” As part of its 2022/23 road works program, Council has plans to rehabilitate several roads that are considered hotspots for repair and maintenance, including sections of Inglewood Road, Old Narrandera Road, Gregadoo Road, Lord Baden Powell Drive, Bakers Lane, Copland Street, Lloyd Road, Nagle Street, and Macleay Street among others. However, Council is waiting for the current weather phenomenon to ease before commencing the works program. “Under traditional road building methods, these rehabilitation projects generally involve removing the weatherproof seal, thus exposing the entire underlying pavement layers to the weather,” Mr Faulkner said. “If we seal a pavement when it’s damp, it locks in moisture which then tries to escape under the pressure of vehicle loading, causing the seal to ‘blister’ and open up, resulting in new potholes. This is a risk we can avoid at the moment. “Ideally, we need warmer and drier conditions to bake out the moisture before we seal to ensure the quality of the pavement and make it more resilient.” Long term plans include applying for all available grants and funding to assist with the rehabilitation of local roads and looking at resources in order to make the roads more resilient to all conditions.