Tuesday 4 September, 2012

Strong interest has been shown in a Tamworth Regional Council tender for the replacement of eight of the region's timber bridges.

There have been 81 downloads of the tender documents and 28 people from 25 companies attended a compulsory pre-tender meeting last week.

The tender includes Reeves Bridge (Forest Road, Tamworth), Plumthorpe Bridge (on Trevallyn Rd, Barraba), Yarramanbully Bridge (Halls Creek), Dunmore Bridge (Halls Creek), Woolbrook Bridge (Woolbrook), Marsden Park No. 3 Bridge (Loomberah), Burgess Bridge (Kia Ora Lane, Loomberah) and Condons Bridge (Loomberah).

Tamworth Regional Council Acting Director of Regional Services, Murray Russell, said due to the size of the contract, the tender period has been extended from the usual three weeks to seven weeks. Tenders will close on Tuesday 9 October.

In February this year, Tamworth regional councillors endorsed a Timber Bridge Management Strategy which aims to reduce the impact of deteriorating bridges on the community. They decided to replace some closed or load limited bridges using a $3.7 million loan and repair three bridges using $320,000 from Council reserves.

In recent weeks, Council received confirmation from the State Treasury Group, Tcorp, that its loan approval under the first round the Local Infrastructure Renewal Scheme has been successfully completed.

The scheme, introduced by the State Government earlier this year, gives councils a four per cent subsidy on interest to offset the cost of loans taken out for infrastructure backlog works.

The subsidy will save Tamworth Regional Council about $800,000 over the 10-year-term of the loan.