ARARAT Rural City Council is actively seeking another contractor to complete work on the Memorial Fountain after years of frustration and delays.<\/p>\n
Council CEO Tim Harrison said the fountain outside Ararat Town Hall has become his \u201cbiggest frustration\u201d after the contractor ceased work almost two years ago.<\/p>\n
Plumbing and wiring work on the historic fountain is complete, but other restoration work ceased at the start of COVID.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s understood a cherub and some orbs are all that\u2019s required for the fountain to be finished.<\/p>\n
In February 2021, Dr Harrison was confident the fountain would be running within weeks, then in June he received another assurance that the restoration was just \u201cweeks\u201d from completion.<\/p>\n
He told the Advocate recently, the delay has now gone beyond a joke.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m finding the fountain an increasingly frustrating project. The artisan who was doing the work for us has gone to ground and I\u2019ve made inquiries with various heritage architects and so forth about moving forward and I\u2019m hoping that very soon we\u2019ll have an alternate was of getting our cherub on top with his orbs and some water flowing, hopefully within the first three months of 2022,\u201d Dr Harrison said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have a lot of laughs at my expense around this project and I understand why. I hate not delivering things as you\u2019re probably aware and I try to keep positive about that project but it has been a pain and we have to finish it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem we\u2019ve got is it is a specialty trade, a specialty craft and there aren\u2019t many people doing this sort of work any more, we\u2019re not producing a lot of new fountains now so we have to find someone to do the work for us but I think we might be getting closer to finding an alternate person,\u201d Dr Harrison said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t go into a restaurant or caf\u00e9 in town without someone mentioning the fountain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The restoration of the Ararat Memorial Fountain commenced three years ago, before Dr Harrison started as Council CEO.<\/p>\n
The Ararat Memorial Fountain is one of only three of its type in Victoria, the other two are located in Williamstown and Hamilton.<\/p>\n
The restoration of the fountain was announced three years ago after funding was secured from the Federal Government and Ararat Community Enterprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ARARAT Rural City Council is actively seeking another contractor to complete work on the Memorial Fountain after years of frustration and delays. Council CEO Tim Harrison said the fountain outside Ararat Town Hall has become his \u201cbiggest frustration\u201d after the contractor ceased work almost two years ago. Plumbing and wiring work on the historic fountain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[31],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/IMG_4361.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqUu4-94","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}