Our Budget 2025–2026, Revenue and Rating Plan 2025–2029, Strategic Property Plan 2025–2030 and Biodiversity Plan 2025–2029 were endorsed at the Council meeting on 30 June.
In May, we shared these draft plans with you. We received 75 submissions in total — including 62 survey and 13 email submissions. Community members could provide feedback on one or more of the draft plans — to help us understand if we had got them right.
Thank you to the community members who helped inform these documents over the past few months by providing feedback through the Our Place, Our Plan community engagement program.
Scroll down for more information on the feedback received and to find out more on how it influenced the final plans.
Our second round of Plans are coming soon so keep an eye on them in the coming months.
The draft Budget received a total of 24 submissions.
The top insights on the draft Budget 2025–2026 focused on the need for increased investment in safety, infrastructure, and amenity upgrades in activity centres and in open space projects for new and existing parks and gardens.
The draft Revenue and Rating Plan received a total of eight submissions.
A request for the rating system to be reformed was the most consistent feedback received.
The draft Strategic Property Plan 2025–2030 received a total of 19 submissions.
The feedback highlighted objections to selling off Council land and buildings, requests to make the plan easier to read and a preference for our buildings to be multipurpose and provide greater shared community spaces.
The draft Biodiversity Plan 2025–2029 received 45 submissions — the most submissions overall.
We heard positive feedback about the plan and its focus on education and greening initiatives. There was strong support for increased planting of indigenous trees and plants, partnering with other stakeholders and land managers to protect biodiversity, and calls for greater protection of our waterways.
The Budget has responded to the community’s feedback about investment in roads, buildings, footpaths, activity centres, libraries, events, waste collection, and sustainability programs.
Budget allocations include:
The following changes resulted from your feedback in the draft plan:
The following changes resulted from your feedback in the draft plan
The following changes resulted from your feedback in the draft plan
These draft plans are the result of community engagement starting in late 2024. Visit the pages below to learn more about each of the main phases of our Our Place, Our Plan community engagement process.
We checked in with our community on our Community Vision 2040 in August 2024. This was our first phase of Our Place, Our Plan community engagement program to develop our next four year strategic plans.
Our second phase of Our Place, Our Plan community engagement program involved broad community and stakeholder engagement in February and March 2025. 52 in person engagement sessions were delivered and included a survey, community pop-ups, an online social map, children's activity sheets, and 28 ideas boxes across Council facilities and other community spaces.
You can read our detailed Our Place, Our Plan Community Engagement Report
Our Community Priorities Panel was the third phase of Our Place, Our Plan community engagement program. A panel of approximately 40 community members worked together over five sessions to create recommendations for Council between March and April 2025.
Our fourth and final phase of Our Place, Our Plan includes two rounds of engagement.
During our first round - we shared our first draft plans with you and asked you if we got them right. These included:
Our second round is still to come so keep an eye out for our final round of draft plans in the coming months.
Have questions or want to learn more about a project, contact us below:
| Phone | 03 9524 3333 |
|---|---|
| mail@gleneira.vic.gov.au |
