That’s the good news for residents and it’s all thanks to a specialist document adopted by council in 2010.

Bathurst Council’s Urban Waterways Management Plan was aimed at developing strategies and recommended actions for the protection and rehabilitation of the Raglan, Hawthornden, Queen Charlotte’s Vale, Sawpit, Jordan and Saltram creek systems.

After adopting the plan, council then committed $50,000 a year towards implementing its recommendations.

This followed initial funding from the Central West Catchment Management Authority (CMA) for the project, which also included a condition assessment of creek reaches within the Bathurst urban environment to act as a baseline for measurement of changes in the condition of the creeks over time.

According to a report to councillors, since the plan was adopted, council has implemented a number of the recommended actions with a particular focus on the rehabilitation of Hawthornden Creek.

“As five years have passed since the initial condition assessment it was considered timely to revisit the condition assessment to assess what impacts various management actions (or lack of management) have had on the condition trend of the creek reaches,” the report states.

“In autumn 2014 council engaged Mactaggart Natural Resource Management (one of the lead authors on the UWMP) to redo the condition assessment on selected reaches of the creek systems and compare these assessments to the original assessments.

“Mactaggart concluded that as a general observation targeted restoration activities and management practices have had a positive contribution to stream condition.

“The rates of improvement vary and in some cases have been significant enough to trigger a shift from a degrading state to a recovering state. In other cases the rate of change has been slower.

“In some cases, despite the best restoration attempts, sites are limited in the degree of improvement due to inherent problems or constraints such as the depth of the gully or location within built environment.