QUEANBEYAN City Councillors will soon have the opportunity to analyse results from two polls asking the community their views on the proposed Ellerton Extension Drive project.
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Data from the the controversial Roads, Maritime and Services' Ellerton Drive Extension poll were recently released.
While, the second poll is a council-endorsed survey of residents living in Googong, Fernleigh Park, Mount Camp-bell, Royalla and Burra asking them whether they prefer the EDE or Dunns Creek Road. It closes today with results available at a later date.
Queanbeyan City Councillor Kenrick Winchester said he was looking forward to seeing the responses to the council-endorsed survey after having reservations about the RMS' phone poll.
"I will be very interested to see the responses, as the Queanbeyan Conser-vation Alliance recently undertook a similar survey which confirmed that residents in these areas would much prefer a Dunns Creek link over the EDE," he said.
"I am certainly not saying that a Dunns Creek road solution won't have an environmental impact, of course it will, but it wouldn't be going through the middle of existing suburbs and it wouldn't create the noise issues for existing residents.
"No traffic solution is perfect, but some are certainly better than others."
In the RMS poll, more than 800 residents in the Queanbeyan Local Government area were surveyed from May 20-25. Statistics revealed more than half of those surveyed supported the project.
"The poll found around 62 per cent of community members supported the EDE, with 16 pc opposed, 21 pc remaining neutral and one per cent stating they remained unsure of the project," a RMS spokesperson said.
Some of the community's concerns relating to the EDE was traffic at Jerrabomberra (18pc), congestion in other areas of Queanbeyan (14pc), impact on the environment (8pc), noise (8pc) and cost (5 pc).
However, Cr Winchester said there were still many questions left unan-swered and hoped the second council end-orsed poll might be able to shed more light on the community's views.
"The main thing I have taken from the RMS survey is that there appears to remain a lot that the wider community do not know about the proposed EDE," he said.
"For example, only 4pc of respondents were aware that developers would be contributing to the cost of it - another example is that 63pc of respondents didn't believe there would be noise concerns for nearby residents - when we already know there will be several 3.6 metre concrete sound walls const-ructed at both ends of the road."
Cr Winchester had previously expressed disappointment after the RMS chose to push ahead with their original set of survey questions despite council amending them and submitting a new list of questions.
"One of the most important questions in the council end-orsed survey (which the RMS refused to ask) related to asking residents if they had read the traffic study or not - this is a crucial question in my opinion, as prior to reading it myself, I too was generally sup-portive of the proposed EDE," he said.
"But after reading the report, and learning more about how the the traffic study was conducted, how decisions were made and how other options were eliminated (not to mention the key role that developers played on the technical working group), I started to ask some serious questions about how we have ended up in the situation we have found ourselves in.
"I firmly believe the more people that read the survey, the more that will start asking questions."
The full poll results can be found on the Roads and Maritime's website at www.rms.nsw.gov.au/projects. Information on the Queanbeyan City Council survey can be found at www.qcc.nsw.gov.au.