Annual budget

Listen

The annual budget details how your rates will be spent to maintain and deliver our facilities and services.

2025-26 Annual Budget

We are currently developing our 2025-26 budget. The budget is being informed by:

feedback from 1,059 people on what our priorities should be for the next 4 years
input from a demographically representative community panel.

The community panel convened in May 2024 to consider the priorities identified by residents and develop themes and strategies for our Council and Health and Wellbeing Plan 2025-29. The annual budget will deliver the actions in the plan.

This approach is in line with our Community Engagement Policy as required by the Local Government Act.

Budget workshop

The community panel was reconvened in November 2024 to provide input to Council’s 2025-26 budget. The panel was asked to:

review the budget allocation across our 24 community services using what the community said should be priorities for Council
make recommendations to increase spending in the services that are highest priority
identify opportunities to reduce spending to balance recommendations for increased spending
provide input to specific ideas that Council could consider as part of its budget.

Public submissions

Given the depth of community engagement activities outlined above there will be no separate public submission process this year.

The next opportunity to make a submission to the budget will be in July 2025. This will inform the 2026-27 budget.

We are bringing this opportunity forward so that public submissions can be considered early in the budget process and have more opportunity to influence the outcome.

This is consistent with what we heard from participants of previous community engagement processes when we recently reviewed Council’s Community Engagement Policy.

Timeline

Month	Milestone
January to February 2024	Feedback from previous community consultation on various topics reviewed
March to April 2024	Survey, focus groups and in person activities at events on Council priorities for the next four years
April 2024	Community panel recruited
May 2024	Community Panel met 3 times to consider community feedback and develop themes and strategies for the Council and Health and Wellbeing Plan 2025-29
November 2024	Community panel met to consider the draft budget 2025-26
December 2024 to April 2025	Consideration of input and developing the draft budget 2025-26
April 2025	Draft budget published
June 2025	Adoption of the 2025-26 budget

Supporting information

Previous annual budgets

Download and view our previous annual budgets below.

Need help?

For more information, please contact:

Name: Liesl Westberry in the Strategy and Transformation department

Phone: 9298 8000

Email: [email protected]