Council & Business
3 July, 2023
Results are in for the 2023 Community Satisfaction Survey of local councils
The Central Goldfields Shire’s overall performance has remained stable compared to last year’s, but new survey results show the community’s satisfaction with sealed local roads has plummeted in the last 12 months. The Community Satisfaction...
The Central Goldfields Shire’s overall performance has remained stable compared to last year’s, but new survey results show the community’s satisfaction with sealed local roads has plummeted in the last 12 months.
The Community Satisfaction Survey is an annual study that provides insight into the community’s views on their respective councils.
Coordinated by Local Government Victoria, survey results were collated from 400 Central Goldfields Shire residents who were interviewed in January and February this year.
Of the 11 categories council were rated on, eight had dropped compared to last year, one had remained the same and two increased.
The survey found the appearance of public areas and waste management were the top performing areas for the Central Goldfields in terms of satisfaction, scoring 67 and 65 out of a possible 100 respectively, with sealed local roads performing the worst with a score of 38.
More than half of the residents aged 18-64 who were surveyed rated local roads as either poor or very poor, with the 50-64 age group the most critical of local roads, with 64 percent rating them poorly.
According to the survey, 2023 marks the worst year for local road performance according to resi-dents, with the Central Goldfields Shire’s results rating worse than both the state-wide average and average of comparable councils.
The results of the survey were noted at last week’s council meeting and councillor Chris Meddows-Taylor said there were some positives to take away.
“I think every council around Victoria and probably around Australia who receive satisfaction surveys would be wanting to do better,” he said.
“What we see in the survey is a decline across the board that is for similar sized councils and overall councils in most measures.
“Some things are hard to explain and vary from year to year, things like waste management and the appearance of public places really don’t change a great deal.
“When we turn to some of the key measures like overall performance, value for money, council direction and customer service — yes, some of these have gone down, but they have actually gone down less than councils overall so we have held our own in difficult times.
“This is not what we ideally want, we want to achieve a perfect result, but overall there are areas we should take satisfaction from.”
According to the survey, overall council direction scored 52 out of 100, a decrease of just one point on 2022, and remains on par with council’s scores for previous years.
Some 20 percent of survey respondents flagged sealed road maintenance as an area for improvement, while 13 percent identified community consultation needed to improve.
Promisingly, survey respondents rated council’s overall direction for the past 12 months higher than the small rural and state-wide averages, with a score of 48 out of 100.
Councillor Wayne Sproull said it was important council maintained its vision and continued working towards the betterment of the community.
“These numbers aren’t exactly what we were hoping to see and we could try to sugar coat them but in reality that wouldn’t do much,” he said.
“Yes we want to see better satisfaction results and believe it or not, continual improvement is something we all work towards in one way or another.
“We do have hard working people trying to do the best for the shire in many ways.
“The most important thing is we keep our vision and keep chipping away.
“No doubt we’ll cop some flak from these results and fair enough to a certain degree, but we work with some amazing people, both staff and volunteers, on a number of projects and they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t believe in what we can achieve together.”
