Cardinia Shire in southeast Melbourne took out the prestigious Local Government Professionals Award for Excellence in the Community Assets and Infrastructure division for its Connecting Cardinia project.
The road development program is a first for Local Government. It involved a long term partnership with the private sector to construct and seal over 50 kilometres of gravel roads and to maintain 80 kilometres of road network over the next 15 years.
Council’s General Manager Assets and Services, Michael Ellis, said the Connecting Cardinia project was designed to service the expanding road network of one of the fastest growing municipalities in Victoria.
“We changed our approach to infrastructure development due to rapid population growth placing unprecedented demands on our road network,” he said. “High traffic volumes on unsealed local roads reduced safety and service levels, increased maintenance costs and had detrimental impacts on the environment.”
Michael Ellis said the project’s success is a result of an innovative performance based contract between Council and contractor, Downer EDi Works, which minimises the long term risk to Council.
The 15 year contract period has enabled the contractor to increase its initial investment in capital works, providing extremely high standards of road construction and a reduction in long term maintenance costs.
The packaging of roads into a significant size project of around $17 million provided substantial reductions in road construction and ongoing maintenance costs due to economies of scale.
The project has advanced Cardinia’s road development program by providing service level improvements to the community that would normally not have been available for at least another 10 years.
Feedback from other Councils has been extremely positive, particularly from high growth municipalities where their infrastructure is being placed under increasing demands. Several interstate Councils have visited Cardinia to view the partnership model and assess whether it could be successfully implemented in their municipality.
Cardinia will use the success of the Connecting Cardinia project as a basis of a delivery model for future projects. This model has broad applications and can be applied just as successfully on major building projects as road development programs.
For further information contact Michael Ellis on (03) 5945 4208.
