Narromine Shire Council seek expressions of interest for water

The council made the announcement on Facebook this week, however people were quick to criticise the request.

Comments posted on the social media site condemned the council with some arguing it's "just plain stupidity" to be asking for water during a drought especially from those who are "doing it hard enough".

Narromine Shire Council's general manager Jane Redden explained the council understood how scarce water was for the community, but were rather expressing interest in entering commercial arrangements with land holders.

"We were certainly never asking anybody to give us anything," she said.

"We've had in the past really good hearted people in our community, as in farmers, when times were good would actually provide us water for roadworks and they would do that free of charge.

"But what we're actually doing is saying thanks for that, but we understand how scarce water is so we're actually going to ask people who may have ground water availability ... in particular areas of the shire where we're trying to do road works that would be happy to sell some water to council."

While many are questioning why the council is continuing to deliver its road works program especially during the drought, Ms Redden explained its their obligation to maintain their assets.

"Just because we're in a drought does not mean that our roads don't deteriorate in drought conditions, so we have to continue to maintain our roads network to the standard that people expect," she said.

"We have a workforce as well, so we can't just pack up our bags for 12 months while we haven't got any water and say 'let's all just sit around and look at each other'.

"We're paying a workforce to deliver a roads program and those people have to continue to be paid so it would be absolutely ridiculous to not try and deliver our roads program."

Ms Redden said the reason they were asking landholders to supply ground water for rural road construction and maintenance was to lower the costs of carting water.

"[The costs of carting water] are so exorbitant that it ends up being that you can hardly get any work done for the budget effectively."