Our annual budget makes day-to-day life in Stonnington possible, funding services like roads, open space, waste and recycling, animal management, maternal and child health, aged services and early education, among many other things.
Preparing for a new annual budget is a significant undertaking for all councils, and community engagement on the City of Stonnington’s budget for 2022-23 got underway in December 2021.
Engagement so far
We ran a first round of community engagement from December 2021 – February 2022 using a new online budget simulation tool to better explain our budget planning process and better involve community in shaping the priorities. During this round of consultation we had over 200 completions of the budget simulator.
The final budget will take insight from this information, as well as feedback across other engagement projects that have helped to shape our projects, strategies and initiatives, including nine months of in-depth conversations with our community that informed our .
What we heard
Using the budget simulator, we were told that what you want is better focus on the following priority areas:
- Maintaining our green and open spaces
- Maintaining our streets, roads and drains
- Open space and placemaking
- Waste collection and disposal
- Improving our environmental performance
- Support our older and diverse community
- Supporting and developing businesses
Next steps
We are now about to conduct another round of community engagement to ‘validate’ what we’ve heard to ensure we are accurately understanding your reactions to our budget simulator.
Join our Budget Stage Two consultation
To test that we have heard our community correctly we will be conducting four online focus group sessions.
During these sessions we will explain the budget process so far, the data we received, how we’ve interpreted it and then we’ll seek your feedback to make sure we’ve understood what you want Council to deliver in this next budget cycle.
Sessions will be held via Zoom and facilitated by MosaicLab, a trusted and experienced community engagement organisation, with Council officers also in attendance. Please note that registrations for these sessions are essential, and only registered attendees will receive the Zoom link to take part.
The focus groups will be held online on the dates outlined below.
- Thursday 28 April 11am – 1pm. .
- Thursday 28 April 6pm – 8pm. .
- Tuesday 3 May 9.30am – 11.30am. .
- Wednesday 4 May 6pm – 8.00pm. .
Stage 3: Formal submissions
Alongside these interactive focus group sessions, we will invite our community to provide feedback on the proposed Budget and Financial Plan via a formal written submission process via our from 3 May.
Questions?
