Council’s flood recovery blows out to 2024 due to $100m damage bill

Repairs to flood damaged roads in the wake of 2022’s multiple disasters are going to take much longer than originally thought, as the damage bill facing Gympie council nears nine figures.

Acting Gympie council CEO David Lewis said 22 submissions to the state’s Recovery Authority were expected to be made, although the extensive amount of detail required in each submission was blowing out how long the work will take to finish.

A nine figure damage bill and an ever-growing length of funding red tape is expected to blow Gympie Regional Council’s flood recovery work out until mid-2024.

Acting corporate services director Greg Evans said at Wednesday’s meeting the damage done to council assets across the region was “significantly more than envisaged” following the first flood in January 2022.

The disaster was soon followed by a devastating 22.96m flood in February, and a third smaller flood in May.

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On Tuesday, January 24, acting communications manager Tom Daunt said the council was “looking at flood damage to its asset base that could reach around $100 million”.

The council brought Cormac Rd Civil on board in March 2022 to help with lodging funding requests with the state’s Flood Recovery Authority.

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The damage bill to Gympie Regional Council’s assets as a result of the trio of 2022 flood disasters is almost $100m.

Unfortunately that process had blown out too.

Mr Evans said the council’s first claim “took 90 days” to finish.

Its second “took 110 days”.

“The biggest challenge yet is the amount of detail required,” Mr Evans said.

“Every 100m of road will need to have before and after photos.”

Acting CEO David Lewis said the first five claims lodged by the council required about 140,000 bits of information.

The council was looking at making 22 claims to the authority in total.

Councillors were told there was expected to be a total of 22 submissions lodged for state government funding as a result of the January, February and May 2022 flood disasters.

Councillors were told this was caused by resourcing constraints at the QRA, which were in the process of being fixed.

Mr Evans said a history of “misspending” of flood recovery funds by other councils in the past had not helped matters either.

Bob Fredman defended the system, telling his fellow councillors they were “getting something for free” so it was “not unusual to have to jump through hoops”.

“Going back a few decades, we wouldn’t have gotten any (funding),” Mr Fredman said.

Councillors voted unanimously to add an extra $476,750 to the contract it originally gave Cormac Rd Civil in 2022, bringing the new total to $1.73m.

An original $2m extension which had been proposed as part of the item was removed from the final report which was tabled at the meeting.

The staff report said the extension should be put to tender “to ensure value for money”.