Last Wednesday the 9th of November, General Manager Derek and myself attended a Water Infrastructure Meeting in Dubbo. We attended along with other Shire Mayors, General Managers and water utilities personnel in the region to discuss proposed water strategies for the next 20 to 40 years along the Macquarie- Castlereagh Regional Water Strategy catchment areas downstream from Burrendong Dam. Some of the plans included possibly restricting flows along the Gunningbar Bar and Duck Creek systems and also different pipeline strategies.
Council held an Extraordinary Meeting on the Thursday the 10th of November to discuss the strategies from the Macquarie- Castlereagh water Infrastructure. Bogan Shire Councillors unanimously voted on three key recommendations from that meeting. Two of the recommendations are of particular interest to our community as Bogan shire LGA coincides with Macquarie- Castlereagh which covers from Oberon in the south east to Brewarrina in the north west. Bogan Shire Council submissions will incorporate the following.
- The Council does not support from the strategies Action 2.2- Create water savings through changed operation of regulated effluent creeks on the grounds that it will have a detrimental effect on landowners along the creeks and on the
- That Council strongly supports that part of Action 2.3 being “Use some of the flood mitigation storage in Burrendong Dam for water ”
- In relation to the proposed Dubbo to Nyngan pipeline, Council draws the NSW Governments attention to the Report- Nyngan Cobar Water Security: Economic Assessment of Options (August 2018) and to resolutions 341/2017 and 019/2018.
With flooding along the Bogan River finally receding, and hopefully continuing to recede, people can start a clean up and get back to normal. All road crew have again been limited with what repairs they can do and it will be quite a while yet before some roads can be accessed properly, although repair works will be carried out where possible. Council staff are assessing road damage to put together claims for flood damage repairs and resheeting, I’m sure this will be quite a list. Hopefully some of these areas will fit into the requirements for the New Betterment Fund, which will see them not only repaired, but improved to cope with future events. The asphalt in Pangee Street has been put on hold until the beginning of January, hopefully by then weather conditions will have improved, and that the nights are considerably warmer, as the cooler nights have caused problems in the laying of the material.
I received a phone call early last week from Bronnie Taylor who is the NSW Minister for Regional Health in regard to staffing levels at Nyngan Multi Purpose Health Service. Bronnie has assured me that there is no intention to close any of our hospital beds permanently and that they are continuing to work to build up staffing numbers to return the Facility to its normal functioning capacity as soon as possible and I sincerely hope this is the case.
Friday the 11th November we commemorated with a ceremony at the cenotaph in front of the shire offices for Remembrance Day to signify the End of the First World War to honour the memory all of those that lost their lives and were affected by the tragedy of War.
Bogan Shire Mayor Glen Neill