She asked the Council to urgently consider the state of South Arm Road and to consider making changes to the way the road is maintained.

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Ms Tesser suggested grading be carried out in a reverse direction so that the furthest stretches of the road be completed first with trucks working towards the sealed section, not away.

South Arm Road is a partially unsealed, roughly 20 kilometre (km) road stretching from Bowraville to the upper reaches of South Arm.

According to Ms Tesser, the unsealed section south of the hall is in a terrible state due to recent rain damage.

“I have lived on this road since May 1980,” Ms Tesser emphatically told the assembled Councillors and council staff.

“In my opinion, the road has never been as bad as it is today.

“When we arrived the road base was ‘creek rock’ and the road was graded twice a year,” Ms Tesser explained.

She said she realised this was no longer considered environmentally sustainable and that since then many different gravels had been tried.

“But as soon as the rain comes, every pothole that was there comes back and they are getting bigger,” she said.

Ms Tesser claimed that the trucks that accompany the grader (presumably carrying equipment and materials) “do more damage than what was already there”.

“I’d like to ask the question: ‘Why do the graders start here and work all the way up to the top of the road?’,” she said.

“It makes sense to me that you [should] start the grade at the top end of the road and work toward the bitumen.

“From the hall here all the way to where I live, we’re ‘playing possum!’

“We’re playing possum to avoid the big potholes, the little potholes and the ‘no-escape’ potholes.”

She said she had recently purchased new tyres on her car and only a week later, had to replace one because of damage caused by the poor conditions of South Arm Road.

Over the last few years Ms Tesser claims to have done “a lot of travelling around through NSW, South Australia and Victoria”.

“I can promise you I always know when I’m back in the Nambucca Valley because these are the worst roads in all of those states!” she said.

Other local roads were brought into focus by Joy van Son representing the Road Action Group (RAG), who particularly highlighted potholes and the condition of North Arm Road as well as the malfunctioning of the app supposedly relied on by residents and council for updates and information on the Valley’s roads.

A council spokesperson was unable to comment on specific roads but explained that council uses a ‘condition-based’ system for determining which roads to grade whereas in past years, the council used a cyclic system which meant that roads were graded on a specific time basis, eg. once or twice a year.

He said council staff would prepare a report into all questions raised by public forum speakers at this meeting although there was no timeline allocated for this.

By Ned COWIE