What is being tendered

The tender opened on 2 September and covers the bridge and its road approaches, the first stage of a new route from Kempsey-Armidale Road across the river to the existing Toose Road. The council's concept is a 135-metre bridge with a 4.5-metre carriageway and shoulders, built for farm and heavy vehicles including 19-metre semi-trailers, with a 100-year design life. Traffic will be light, so it is one lane, with waiting bays at each end for vehicles to pass.

The winning contractor does the detailed design as well as the build, so the drawings shown to residents are a layout, not the final plans. The council's project page puts the funding at about $21 million from the Australian and NSW Governments for the long-term access solution as a whole: the new intersection, the bridge, and the road linking through to Toose Road.

Why a bridge and not a repair

The obvious question, which the council itself said in July 2022 dominated the conversation, is why the road cannot just be fixed. The answer is in what each estimate cost.

  • July 2022: a second independent geotechnical report said repairs would be highly complex, could take as long as two years, and would cost upward of $15 million. Hard rock sat 17 to 35 metres down, above a 50-metre drop to the river.
  • October 2023: a Transport for NSW peer review of all the consultants' reports found permanent remediation not considered feasible and named a new Macleay River bridge as the most likely way to restore access.
  • The options study, final revision June 2024: the council's consultant, GHD, costed a concept to hold the slope with about 37 kilometres of soil nails and a piled wall at roughly $44 million before contingency. That would stabilise only the recent slip. The unstable ground beside it is close to twice as long, and GHD concluded it's not unreasonable to expect that a fix in place solution could cost in the order of $100m.

GHD compared nine options. Two ranked high, both crossings from Kempsey-Armidale Road to Jimmys Point, one lower and one higher. The council's preferred solution is a crossing between the two, with the exact spot left to the design stage.

The trade-off the design accepts

The tender update is plain that the bridge will stay open in the more frequent floods but is expected to be overtopped during larger floods. That is a design choice, not a flaw, and it matches the river's other crossings. The original Toose Road also used a low-level bridge over the Macleay, and GHD's comparison lists Bellbrook Bridge upstream as a 115-metre single-lane bridge. For the families on the far side it means a big flood will still cut them off for a time. Compare what they have now: the temporary track from Fifes Creek Road is restricted to four-wheel drives and can only be used in dry weather.

How long it has taken

The slip came in the March 2022 flood. The council sent residents weekly updates from May 2022 and opened the short-term access track that November. It resolved in August 2023 to compulsorily acquire a Crown road corridor at Bellbrook for the new route. The options report went to Transport for NSW for an independent technical review, which the council says a funding request of that size for a new road alignment requires, and GHD's final revision answering that review is dated 25 June 2024. In June 2025, after the May floods, inspections found the embankment was still moving, and the council planned a temporary access track so surveys and investigations could start.

The council's September update acknowledges the significant impact the loss of Toose Road has had on residents and landholders over the past four years.

Our view: the engineering case for a bridge is strong and well documented; the council has published its geotechnical reports and options study for anyone to read. What is missing is a date. After four and a half years, the people waiting on this road should get an expected construction window when councillors pick a contractor in November, even a provisional one, along with the approvals still outstanding. We will read the November business paper and report what it says.