How much would you pay for a road and a weir

"How much would you pay for a road and a weir?" This is one of the many questions Councillors are asking in back-room workshops and briefings as they attempt to justify their failure to remove an illegal gate across a public road and make excuses why the public road (Coopers Island Road) has not been graded in the past two years. It is also understood that the Council have engaged a valuer to determine a value for the road reserve, the section of crown reserve and the weir itself. While the valuer might consider the land value only past agreed sales of like sections of Public Road giving access to the public and to recreational fishers has resulted in compensation in excess of $2 million dollars. To have ownership of Coopers Island Road and the weir would give the property owner exclusive rights to the only access point to Bowns Creek and to Trucketabella Lake. Such exclusivity would be of considerable benefit to farming land that is also zoned for tourism development and housing. What is known is that the some of the councillors appear to be of a mind that the public road, that has provided generations of Eurobodalla residents to access the Tuross Lake foreshore, can be sold. It is understood that this will be a recommendation put before the councillors at their next meeting. Coopers Island Road has long been graded by Council together with the reserve area adjacent to the Bowns Creek shore area and the Council built concrete weir that has provided legal cultural and recreational fishers direct access to Tuross Lake. The new owners of the property decided however that they did not want the public driving along the road. Rather than cleaning out the cattle grid that worked as a safety buffer should any cattle escape their paddocks into the adjacent public road reserve the owners opted two years ago to erect an illegal gate across the public road that would then allow the cows to wander the road reserve as if it were another paddock. This in itself is understood to be illegal without a Grazing Stock on a Public Road permit. If cows are brought onto a road way the rules state that they must be supervised and that would see their supervisor ensuring they did not go near the cattle grid. But such facts appear to have eluded some of our councillors with two of them suggesting that cows can jump cattle grids, thereby justifying the illegal gate. General discussion in backrooms reminded the cow-jumping theorists that a well maintained cattle grid to stop a cow that may have escaped into a road reserve worked perfectly well nation wide and that the long serving Coopers Island cattle grid, originally installed by the Coopers has worked perfectly for decades. As to how much a concrete weir constructed by the Council with ratepayers money along with a section of Crown reserve adjacent to the creek might garner in today's volatile real estate market is another question the back-room solutionists have been pondering. All should be revealed of their intentions next week when the next Council agenda is released. In the meantime the councillors can expect some additional reading on the matter in their secret weekly Newsletter out today.

Above: Some of our Eurobodalla councillors believe cows can readily jump across cattle grids justifying the illegal gate on Coopers Island Road. Council say "the road is graded annually, however it has not been graded for two years due to access issues". And what access issues are they? The gate above is certainly wide enough to allow a grader and water truck entry. So Councillors, exactly what "access issues" are your staff talking about? Council staff also say "There are several issues associated with Coopers Island Road and these will be addressed by Council shortly." For more than four decades there has been NO issue with Coopers Island Road, the Council built weir or the access to Tuross Lake via the Crown foreshore reserve. But now, with a new owner, there appears to be "several issues". Hopefully the Council will be open and transparent about what these issues are. To date they have not.