Knox Council has officially endorsed its 2025/26 draft budget amongst a number of other documents for community review after their most recent meeting on Monday 26 May.
A number of documents are now available for residents of Knox to give feedback on until 9 June and council are encouraging their residents to weigh in.
The draft budget for 2025-2026, along with the new draft for council’s and health and wellbeing plan 2025-29 and others have been released online.
At the recent council meeting on Monday 26 May, Mayor Lisa Cooper said the council has listened to their community’s needs and priorities in developing a new council and health and wellbeing plan 2025, to 2029, which helps shape the draft budget.
“It sets out what we will do, shaped by your aspirations, needs and values and priorities and inform long-term financial planning,” she said.
Overall, the rates revenue will rise by an average of three percent in line with the Victorian Government’s rate cap, although rate increases (or decreases) experienced by individual ratepayers may differ from the 3 percent depending on the value of their property based on independent valuations.
The proposed budget invests $122.4 million in services and facilities and the 2025-26 capital works program, totalling nearly $58 million (including nearly $16 million worth of projects carried forward from 2024-25), and also includes a number of upgrades to the Knox area.
$10.7 million has been pledged for local roads and bridges, and $9.2 million to upgrade sporting pavilions, including Park Ridge Reserve, Wally Tew Reserve, Tormore Reserve and Carrington Park.
A representative group of residents helped shape the new drafts, with over 1,000 community members involved in one or more of the community engagement activities undertaken over several months in early 2024.
Social media groups in Knox have drawn attention to the feedback process and said the ‘have your say’ process is ‘a new low’.
However, draft budgets are no longer required by legislation, although for 2023-24 most Victorian councils (75 of 79) still prepared one.
Of the 75 councils that prepared a draft budget, 16 invited community submissions for 28 days (the previous legislative timeline specified in the Local Government Act 1989) and four councils (Bendigo, Maroondah, Monash and Mornington) did not issue a draft budget.
Knox residents will have two weeks to contribute.
In welcome news, council has retained the rate rebate of up to $100 for eligible pensioners, on top of the Victorian Government’s pensioner rebate and there will be a reduction in garbage costs for residents.
At the meeting, Deputy Mayor and Councillor Glen Atwell said on the evening that the draft does strike a balance.
“It strikes the balance between keeping our rates and charges as low as possible while ensuring we continue to deliver the community facilities and services that our residents demand,” he said.
Councillor Lockwood ultimately commended the draft budget but brought several of his own concerns up, namely the documents being listed together, the rate rise being closer to four percent and that councillors didn’t get a lot of time to review the draft.
“Personally, I’m not a big fan the of the combined strategic plan, the council plan, with the community health and wellbeing plan,” he said.
“I did express concerns internally about the drawn-out nature of the budget and going over things we’ve already done, and we didn’t actually see a draft budget until very late in the piece, that concerned me greatly.”
“The other aspects that I think we need to do further work on, the disappearing discretionary reserves, more than $7.8 million that’s listed in the budget.”
Cr Lockwood said he also thought selling property as a means of funding was not very sustainable and noted that youth spending is down.
“We did lose our youth counselling service,” he said.
Cr Williams said a key thing for him was the opportunity for the community to provide feedback.
“Community consultation plays a big part in the budget,” he said.
“So please send your feedback through, speak to your local councillors and engage with us.”
Knox is giving residents from 17 May to 9 June to weigh in and four draft plans are now available for the Knox community for questions and feedback on their ‘Have your Say’ website.
