Amongst the many correspondents understandably aghast at a second 35 per cent SRV, last week we were told that traffic lights would be ‘absurd’ on Ewingsdale Road. Ultimately came the real rationale: ‘Please, no traffic lights in Byron’.
While Council is on a fiscal precipice, let’s consider how dearly we pay for the quaint and bizarre notions our councillors indulge. Thankfully not yet in lost lives – but it’s been close!
In 2025, councillors refused a second offer of a $1.9m grant to upgrade the Clifford Street and Broken Head Road intersection, this despite the urgency for action appearing on Council agendas since 1996!
Over this 30 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of staff hours, have been expended on designs and studies that came to nothing, until a diligent grants officer secured the funds to fix it.
Instead of completed and paid for, this intersection now appears in documents with a price tag of $7.1m, presumably minus land purchase. Council staff, without any contingency for next steps, are forced to invest yet more funds in designs and studies with every likelihood that, like all their predecessors, they will be redundant before one sod is turned.
I could give more examples that word limits won’t permit. Before we excoriate our general manager et al, let’s consider that the saying ‘we get the governance we deserve’ applies to all three tiers.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
