€50m cost of land halted road project
A PRICE TAG of €10m per kilometre in land costs alone proved too dear for the National Roads Authority, which was forced to cancel a road building project earlier this year due to the exorbitant cost of farmland.
For the first time ever, the NRA allowed a compulsory purchase order to acquire land for the road to lapse in January because it simply couldn't afford to buy the land needed for the project, Michael Egan, the NRA's head of corporate affairs, told a Dail committee yesterday.
It would have cost the State more than €50m solely in land acquisition costs to build the five kilometre relief road off the N72 in Mallow, Co Cork, he told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Food yesterday.
The land in question was originally valued at €14.6m in 2005 but after Cork County Council re-zoned the land, it shot up in price to more than €50m by the end of 2007 after An Bord Pleanala had given the green light for a compulsory purchase order to go ahead, he said.
"It's difficult enough to get a compulsory purchase order but this is the first time we've had to rescind it," he told the Irish Independent.
"Given the escalation of costs, it didn't represent value for money. We weren't in a position to buy it," he said.
"We were faced with paying development cost prices."
And it wasn't the first time that the value of land has gone up considerably following a council planning decision, he added.
"Council decisions have been a factor. We're now appealing to them not to re-zone land," he said of land that the NRA is looking to expropriate for road building.
In fact, the cost of farmland has become one of the most expensive aspects of road-building and now accounts for close to a quarter of all associated costs, he told the committee.
More than €383m -- or 23pc of the NRA's €1.7bn budget last year -- was spent on land acquisition compared to about 10pc of its annual budget in 2003, he said.
Farmers are also entitled to a minimum compensation payment of €5,000 per acre.
- Allison Bray
