After 13 years with Shoalhaven City Council, popular director of assets and works Ben Stewart is leaving to take up a new position with Shellharbour City Council.
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Mr Stewart began his local career with Shoalhaven Water in the midst of one of Australia’s longest running droughts.
He helped oversee several large projects, including the Lake Tabourie, Lake Conjola and Currarong sewerage schemes, the upgrades of St Georges Basin, Shoalhaven Heads and Ulladulla sewage treatment plants.
In his assets and works role, he worked on big -ticket items such as the new Nowra Aquatic Park and the Ulladulla Civic Centre.
He said the past few years had been the most challenging.
“I think the community has worked with us well over the past few years to really set their priorities but the expectations are high,” he said.
“We have over 1400 kilometres of roads, over 4600 square kilometres of area to cover and it is really difficult to stretch our resources that far.
“The staff are great at supporting me but there are days when you think, ‘How are we are going to get to that issue in a reasonable amount of time?’”
There were challenges, too, working with Shoalhaven Water, especially establishing sewerage schemes in older communities such as Lake Conjola. Residents, he said, often feared modernising sewerage would lead to over-development.
Retrofitting a new system to an established town also presented difficult engineering challenges.
Politics occasionally intruded too. When council decided to improve road safety on Gerroa Road, Mr Stewart was caught up in the fight to save the iconic Bum Tree – a landmark he knew too well, having grown up in Gerroa.
“Residents expected the environment to be looked after and at the same time we had to look road safety,” he said.
Fire and flood have also presented themselves during Mr Stewart’s tenure with council.
He was involved heavily during the 2013 Deans Gap fire emergency and 2015 flood emergency that impacted heavily on Shoalhaven Heads, Sussex Inlet and Lake Conjola.
“I have been out in the middle of the night feeding information back to the SES,” he said.
His said his job had been made easier by support from the federal and state governments. He singled out the federal funding council received for sealing Turpentine Road, which he described as an important economic link for the city.