Whittlesea council has welcomed a new website that enables people to assess and compare their council’s performance against those in the rest of the state.
Mayor Stevan Kozmevski said the Know Your Council website was an important information source for residents to connect to and understand their council.
“Accountability and transparency sit at the core of democratic governments,” he said.
“The new website provides residents with another opportunity to assess the council’s performance, and provides the organisation with a new vehicle for identifying areas for improvement.”
The website – www.knowyourcouncil.vic.gov.au – allows people to compare the performance of their council by 66 different measures, including costs of visiting local pools, the number of active library members, and missed kerbside bin collections.
Municipal Association of Victoria president Bill McArthur said the municipal lobby group supported the enhanced transparency and accountability that the website would give ratepayers, but he was concerned there were too many performance measures.
WHITTLESEA MAYOR STEVAN KOSMEVSKI (SUPPLIED)
“It will be useful for communities to access information to better understand how their rates dollars are spent, but we have a number of concerns about some of the 94 performance measures adopted,” he said.
“The state government made an election commitment to work with councils to reduce the number of performance measures to make the data more meaningful, and we look forward to that occurring.”
Cr McArthur said it was important for users to read the ‘council says’ information alongside the measures, as it provides context about the results and helps explain differences when comparing one council with another.
The website shows that the average cost of visiting an indoor pool in Whittlesea is $8.51, compared to $2.08 for “similar councils”. About 16 per cent of ratepayers are active library users, which is on par with similar councils.
Almost four in every 10,000 kerbside bins were missed in the 2014-15 financial year. Similar councils missed almost seven in every 10,000 bins.
Hume council chief executive Domenic Isola said having measures was good ‘‘to a point’’, but results could merely reflect a difference in focus or priorities at a given time. He said the needs of what the website termed ‘‘similar’’ councils could also be quite different.
However, Mr Isola accepted that planning delays could be reduced. Planning applications in Hume took an average of 97.4 days to be determined, compared to the similar council average of 82. “I look at that base number and say, we could be doing better,’’ he said.
