Funding flood resilience and improvements

In July 2023, the District experienced another significant rainfall event.

More than 150mm of rain fell in some areas over the course of three days. Council staff and Civil Defence set up an Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) to deal with the level of service requests and to monitor roads and river levels.

With climate change, this is now becoming a common occurrence.

Our Civil Defence team and Council staff work through these events to ensure our infrastructure is functioning, any issues are addressed, main roads remain accessible, and signage is placed in flooded areas where extreme caution is required—all so any risks to residents is minimised.

During this event, the Council received over 335 requests for service from affected residents. In July 2022, a more severe series of rainfall events resulted in over 800 requests.

Residents have told the Council, through Customer Satisfaction Surveys, they want additional action to be taken on identified flooding risk issues.

To address this amount of recovery work, which will take several months to work through, the Council established a Flood Team last August who are tasked with assessing requests and prioritising work where it’s most needed.

The team will not only input to the response and recovery works in future flood events. They will focus on implementing risk and resilience improvement projects, identified through previous flood events. This will improve the Council’s and community’s readiness and preparedness for future events heavy rainfall events.

However, the establishment of this team and additional spend to maintenance budgets has only been approved for one year and was unbudgeted.

As these types of events are expected to occur more frequently in the future, the Council sees benefit in establishing a permanent Infrastructure Resilience Team and setting up a Flood Recovery and Resilience fund, so that we can prepare and respond to future severe rainfall events.

OPTIONS

A: Council’s preference

The Council establishes a permanent Infrastructure Resilience Team and sets up a Flood Recovery and Resilience fund.

This team would implement infrastructure works to cater for more frequent heavy weather events, climate change and the associated impact on our services.

This will increase levels of service for the economic outcome that Infrastructure and services are sustainable, resilient and affordable.

B: No additional funding is allocated

Council continues to respond to flood events as they occur. Our business and usual investment would continue but we would expect future rainfall events to require unbudgeted spend.