YARRIAMBIACK Shire mayor Graeme Massey is inviting residents to give more detailed feedback, following a new report that shows community satisfaction has dropped considerably compared to previous years.
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Councillors considered the municipality's 2020 Community Satisfaction Survey at its Wednesday meeting. It showed ratepayers scored the shire's overall performance at 56, its lowest score since 2016 and down from 62 in 2019's survey.
The council is performing better than average in the areas of lobbying, community decisions and consultation and engagement, and lower than average in residents' estimates when it comes to the sealing of roads.
Cr Massey said the organisation was interested to know why people had left the scores they did.
"We thought the survey might be better," he said.
"if these results are to be treated seriously - and we do - it would be really nice to know if there were comments recorded from people about why they gave the ranking they did.
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"If someone only gave us a two out of five for a category, it would be nice to know why. We only get the general comments, which are based on interpreting the data rather than interpreting the reasons why people put it there."
"When we looked at it in council we looked at the trendline, and from when this council formed in 2016 there is an upward trend in all categories, so we took that as a sign that we are at least not going backwards."
Cr Massey said the Local Government Inspectorate's report on the council's Hopetoun depot in November, and rates being due in February may have influenced the results of the survey, which was distributed for feedback from January until March 2020.
"We can't do too much about sealing all our roads because they don't have the volume of traffic to justify that, and that's an expensive exercise," he said. "We do our best to try and seal roads where we can, but it's beyond our budget really: We've got 5000 kilometres of road."