COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

South Dublin County Council Crest

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, September 11, 2023

QUESTION NO. 36

QUESTION: Councillor E. Ó Broin

To ask the Chief Executive, why despite the ambition of Cycle South Dublin and other active travel initiatives, that this local authority has by far the lowest budgetary allocation for staffing for Active Travel projects for 2023 of the four Dublin Local Authorities? Note, Local Authority allocations are published online by the NTA under,'Active Travel Investment Grants: 2023 Allocations'.

REPLY:

The Dept of Transport secured funding for Local Authorities to appoint staff to work on Active Travel projects. This funding was allocated for 5 years only. However, in the interest of attracting quality staff, SDCC has taken the decision to permanently appoint a team of people to work on dedicated active travel and new street projects.

The overall team consists of 12 people including engineers, landscape architects and admin staff. There are currently two vacancies in the team.

The team are actively progressing delivery of the Council's agreed Cycle South Dublin programme and to date the team has made progress on over 20 projects. Several projects have been completed, more are currently on site, and there are numerous schemes in the planning and design stages. 

NTA funding can only be drawn down for staff that are working solely on NTA funded projects. Currently 8 of the Council's team are working on NTA funded projects alone and so the staff funding allocation is based on this number of staff. 

The NTA allocated c.22m (which includes c.700k for staff) to SDCC for 2023. SDCC had initially requested more overall capital funding for 2023 to allow us to progress additional active travel works however this was not secured. Based on the current level of capital funding from the NTA that has been made available to the Council, the Council is projecting to spend close to the full amount of this funding and has sufficient staff in place to deliver this work.

In 2024 the overall level of capital funding may increase along with the level of staff funding required.