Albury residents planning a school holiday getaway in the Victorian high country have hit a roadblock with Tawonga South, Harrietville and Porepunkah being excluded from the revised border region area.
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People living in those Alpine Shire towns also still cannot cross the border into Albury for work and daily life purposes in a move which has been described as a bureaucratic oversight.
In the latest changes revealed on Thursday, Bright, Tawonga and Mount Beauty were added to the border region map with Tawonga South being a glaring omission given it sits between Tawonga and Mount Beauty.
Also, Great Alpine Road communities Ovens and Eurobin have not been brought into the the bubble along with Bright and Myrtleford.
"How could this happen?" Alpine Shire mayor Peter Roper said.
"Hopefully they can sort it out sooner rather than later, but Shepparton and other places which have been added took two weeks.
"People can still come from regional Victoria, but not NSW."
Andrew McEnnally owns Kiewa Country Cottages at Tawonga South and was shocked the town had been left out for a second time.
"It has to be an oversight on the data entry when they were setting it all up," he said.
"We're living in strange times, but not even the bureaucracy can be that crazy surely?
"You've got to drive through Tawonga South to get to Tawonga or Mount Beauty.
"Technically if anyone came from Albury and wanted to go to Mount Beauty they couldn't come through here.
"There are a lot of people around here who work in Albury and haven't been able to go for two months now.
"It's the same with getting kids to school."
Kiewa Country Cottages remains off-limits to its biggest customer base, Melbourne, and has only been open for six weeks in 2020 due to bushfires and two COVID-related lockdowns.
The NSW Cross Border Commissioner James McTavish has been contacted for comment.
Member for Ovens Valley Tim McCurdy said he was deflated to find out the Ovens Valley communities were not added with Whitfeld in the King Valley also on the outer.
"It just defies logic," he said.
:"I can understand how things can go wrong in the first place, but if you go back and re-visit it I would have thought you would get it right.
"There is no rhyme nor reason or commonsense to leave those small communities out.
"Particularly the ones that are at the end of a valley.
"I get you've got to draw a line somewhere, but some use of commonsense wouldn't go astray.
"They need to have another look at it."
On the northern side of the border, the entire Federation Council area is now inside the border region with addition of Morundah and Boree Creek with region extending almost to the Sturt Highway.
Lockhart, Osborne and Pleasant Hills have also been included.
