A FURTHER £3m raid on the county's piggy bank has been approved to fix the pothole blighted roads - but hundreds of millions of pounds are needed to completely eradicate the problem, says council chief Martin Tett.
The extra £3m cash, to be added to the £25m pot for the next two years, which had already been announced, will come from reserves.
Reserves are normally considered funds to be used for emergencies and to be kept as a contingency for unforeseen circumstances.
It brings the amount taken from reserves to spend on roads for the next two years to £8m. In the previous three years £30m in total was spent on road repairs, with £10m of that also coming from the reserve accounts.
The decision was voted through unanimously by Buckinghamshire County Councillors at the AGM on May 23.
New Cabinet Member, Janet Blake, now in charge of transport, said: "In direct response to concerns raised by our residents to all county council members during the elections campaign, we want to help further reduce the roads maintenance backlog. Roads affect every single person in the county, so we need to enable safe and efficient travel. "
Leader Cllr Martin Tett, told the Free Press: "On road resurfacing we've spent £30m in the last 2 years, we plan to spend at least £25m over the next two years.
"We are also spending £8m each and every year on filling potholes. When you add all that money together, it's a shed load that we're spending on the roads each year.
"It clearly isn't enough, which is why we've released even more to patch and plane some of the worst roads in the county."
He said with the council's government grant cut by 44 per cent over the last four years there was not enough money unless they dipped into the reserve funds and it had been decided now was the time to use it.
He said: "We're spending a lot of money from the piggy bank, effectively, to fix the roads. But we can't keep taking money out of reserves, we're going to be down to about £22m which is not a lot when you look at the overall amount of money we spend.
"People say why 'don't they just fix all the potholes'.
"If it was that easy, we could. The money we have to play with in terms of diversion is very small.
"The reality is half the money the council spends is spent on education.
"Of the money left, with that out of the equation, about 60 per cent is spent on protecting vulnerable children and care for adults.
"That's really important. So it's really tough to put more money into roads."
He added: "I'm not saying people are wrong to raise it, I'm living in a road full of potholes. But we'd need hundreds of millions of pounds to fix all the roads in the county."
For more on the road repairs programme see www.transportforbucks.net/Transport-and-roads.aspx
