Councillors signed off on the 2017-18 budget on Wednesday night, including an amount of $1.7 million set aside for an upgrade of the Mitre, Lambert and Suttor streets intersection at West Bathurst.

Crucially, councillors also committed to fully funding the project from council coffers if no blackspot funding is made available through the Roads and Maritime Services.

That would require taking money from other council projects during the 2017-18 financial year and a further report would come back to council detailing which projects would miss out.

Wednesday night’s decision was a significant victory for nearby residents Kent and Diane McNab who have campaigned hard for the intersection since a bad crash near the intersection in November 2016.

Speaking from the public gallery on Wednesday night, Mr McNab said that crash would have been had a tragedy had it occurred just 15 minutes earlier as students were leaving the Assumption School.

“This was and still is the catalyst for our actions to have the intersection made safer,” he said.

“The three schools and their parent organisations situated in this education hub have also been vocal in their requests to the council to consider the safety of their students who travel through this intersection.”

The McNabs collected 4400 signatures supporting the installation of a roundabout and that petition has been a central plank to their campaign.

Attention will now turn to fine-tuning the final design of the intersection after preliminary drawings supplied by council showed an existing pedestrian crossing on Suttor Street, outside the Michel’s Corner shops, had been removed.

Mr McNab told councillors the crossing should be reinstated once the roundabout is in place for the safety of children and less mobile members of the public.

“We note that council engineers have advised that a final plan has not yet been prepared but that local residents will have the opportunity to comment on that final plan,” he said.

“Safety is paramount at this intersection. We therefore look forward to the continued inclusion of the marked pedestrian crossing in the new detailed plan to provide a safe crossing for young school children, older residents, residents with disabilities and others.”

The former Bathurst City Council first identified the need for a roundabout at the intersection in 1997, saying it was required to cope with growing populations in West Bathurst, Llanarth and Windradyne.

That area of town has grown dramatically in the two decades since that first report, greatly increasing the traffic flow through the problem intersection.

For years inaction was blamed on a lack of blackspot funding from the RMS (previously RTA) so council’s commitment to fully fund the roundabout, if necessary, is a major win for the McNabs and their supporters.

No timelines have been released yet regarding the start of work on the roundabout.