Ballarat construction businesses have expressed their relief after the city was released from lockdown on Thursday, allowing them to get back on site.
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Construction in locked-down areas of the state, including Ballarat, had been shut-down completely since Tuesday after a disproportionate amount of cases had been found in the industry.
However, with Ballarat rejoining the rest of regional Victoria, except Geelong and the Surf Coast, construction will be allowed to resume throughout the city.
Nicholson Construction director Steve Allen said the news came as a huge relief to the industry.
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"We were plunged into a shutdown period not knowing what the duration of that shut down would be and, obviously, it has a significant effect on not just construction businesses such as ours, but all of the local suppliers and subcontractors that we rely on and who rely on us as well," he said.
"Our guys are very eager to get back to work, so I think with that eagerness and enthusiasm, we'll find restarting relatively easy."
With offices in Ballarat, Geelong, Bendigo and Warrnambool, Nicholson Construction has spent much of the week dealing with the logistics of having two areas shut-down and two operational, but that has had to shift with Ballarat being released.
"It certainly presents a number of challenges given now, with Ballarat coming out of lockdown, our Ballarat trades can't travel into Geelong and the Geelong trades can't travel out because Geelong is still in that shutdown area," Mr Allen said.
"We ensure that we place a really high importance on resourcing those projects with local subcontractors wherever we can. With our Ballarat projects, the vast majority of our subcontractors are Ballarat-based subcontractors, so the effect on our Ballarat projects will be negligible."
Ballarat residential builder Stroud Homes is also keen to get back to work, but co-owner Simon Walshe said the turnaround would not be seamless.
"We did discuss the idea of trying to schedule for tomorrow two days ago, but decided against it. There's nothing worse than having to reschedule for two days' time and then two days' time comes and you've got to reschedule again, so we did hold off expecting it to go longer," he said.
"We'll do our best to get going but I wouldn't be surprised if we'll lose at least a week's productivity from the shutdown.
"We're very lucky in that we're a local builder that goes out of our way to use local trades. We're pretty against bringing trades up from Melbourne as it was already, so having our local team that we use every day definitely makes life a lot easier during these times."
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