Deteriorating roads are increasingly draining Victorian council budgets and more investment is needed to strengthen them against extreme weather events, an inquiry has been told.
Pothole costs in Murrindindi, northeast of Melbourne, have tripled in recent years while 12 bridges, 27 culverts and 15 major roads were seriously damaged in October's floods, the shire's director of assets and environment Vito Albicini said.
"Roads are the lifeline of the community," Mr Albicini told a parliamentary inquiry into weather impacts on rural and regional roads.
"It's not just about transporting food, it's around their social health and wellbeing, it's the only way to connect people ... It's also the only way to get out of emergencies."
Mr Albinici said building resilient roads and sealing unsealed roads, rather than just repairing them, was key to avoiding constant and continual maintenance.
"At the moment we tend to be fixing them, just to find we have to fix them again in six months' time," he said.
"We really do need federal funding support in a regular panel to help us."
The road maintenance issue was similar in Mansfield Shire in the foothills of Mount Buller snow resort.
There, conditions suffered under high tourist volumes and a relatively low ratepayer base, the council's infrastructure and planning general manager Melissa Crane said.
"It leaves us with limited ability to do any upgrade works that would actually allow us to make our road network more resilient," Ms Crane told the committee.
"That's a really big gap in terms of how funding works."
