Black Summer ravaged town Cobargo to hold info session on milestones and roadmap for their main street rebuild

The Cobargo Community Development Corporation has been busy with carrying out their five formal stages of community consultations, events and activities to bring everyone up to speed, and now want to present to the community a review on that process.

Over the past six months the CCDC has been through a long and very robust process of onboarding with the government to execute the funding deed, a process that has taken about six months.

READ ALSO: Rebuild Cobargo gets the green light for main street rebuild project

CCDC spokesperson John Walters said the event will outline the engagement to date with all parties involved including the architects and building consultants.

"With any development of this scale there's a host of subconsultants, heritage, traffic, bushfire, energy, surveyors, it just goes on and on. You've got to have all of these in place for a on a multi-mullion dollar project.

"We've progressed a number of other matters around moving into the nuts and bolts of the rebuild," said Mr Walters.

The next stage of the project would be to move forward with the detailed designs.

Mr Walters wanted to reassure the community that during that process there would be community and stakeholder consultation, as well as engagement with Bega Valley Shire Council, and other property owners in the precinct.

There would also then be consultation with government departments such as NSW Transport in terms of parking and road safety, and Essential Energy because there was currently no power to any of the sites.

"We've already opened discussions about the fact we need to restore a lot of power infrastructure there and we're saying, well maybe this is an opportunity backing into the micro grid project," he said.

Mr Walters said it was a project that was focused on the long-term resilience of the community and creating alternatives for the case of future emergency situations.

For the main street rebuild, the CCDC was hoping to discuss with Essential Energy how the grid system could be enhanced to be more resilient, such as alternatives to poles and wires in the street. A proposed possibility would be moving into underground power.

"Their conventional attitude is to replace like with like, but they've been very open to talk to us about maybe there's some sense in going underground and so what does that look like, what are the design and engineering obstacles and so forth to achieving that outcome," said Mr Walters.

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In terms of the timeline for the DA application, the CCDC was expecting to lodge in about four months' time.

From there the council would have three months to review the application.

"We don't anticipate that the council will take any longer than the three months, but we expect it to take the full three months because this is a project that has a lot of design and engineering in it, there's also conservation overlay, and bushfire safety considerations," said Mr Walters.

The expected time for the project to commence was probably around 6 to 8 months, with Mr Walters suggesting there won't be building works starting until the fourth quarter of the calendar year.

There has been some concerns raised in the community about the timeline given by the government to complete the project, as it was initially outlined that it had to be completed no later than June 30 2023.

Mr Walters said a Project Control Group consisting of CCDC representatives, the project manager, the Bushfire Recovery Fund program coordinator, and the representative of public works has been working on just that.

"Through that mechanism we've expressed concern about the timeline. From what we understand, most of the projects from NSW have expressed similar concerns.

He said it was the group's understanding that state government officials have been negotiating with the federal government to request an extension because it's state and federal government funded scheme.

"We believe that they are sympathetically considering it, but we have no advice at this stage. We are fairly hopeful there will be a reasonable six months of extension, we could work with that and it would give us a full two year period from now to get it finished," said Mr Walters.

The community information event will be held on Saturday March 19 from 2pm until 4pm at the Cobargo School of Arts Hall with directors, architects, Councillor Helen O'Neil, and Bega State Member Dr Michael Holland all attending.

There will be a short presentation followed by quite an extensive Q&A session.