Mayor's Message - Friday 27 June 2025

Each year, the City of Ballarat commissions an independent company to survey the Ballarat community to understand how well we are delivering our services.

This year’s Community Satisfaction Survey was conducted throughout February and March. Around 400 residents were interviewed on all aspects of City of Ballarat services including waste management, customer service, community consultation, value for money, sealed local roads, overall performance and overall Council direction.

The results of the survey are now in and encouragingly, performance perceptions on most individual service areas remained stable since the previous evaluation, with the exception of sealed local roads where performance perceptions significantly improved.

We continue to perform best in the area of waste management and pleasingly we have been able to maintain our positive performance in this service area for four years now.

This is encouraging news as we move towards aligning with the State Government Service Standard in this area, introducing Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) and glass kerbside collection services later this year.

Another area where Council performed relatively well was community consultation and engagement. From the beginning, this Council group has been passionate about community consultation, introducing initiatives such as Let’s Chat Ballarat, the Councillor Roadshow, and increased opportunities for feedback through MySay and in person.  

Among those who took the survey and had been in contact with Council in the past year, 63 per cent provided a positive customer service rating of ‘very good’ or ‘good’ - which is a positive acknowledgement of our Customer Experience services.

Pleasingly, the survey showed that Council’s customer service ratings are now highest among residents aged 50 to 64 years, who in prior evaluations had consistently provided some of the lowest ratings.

With the Council Plan 2025-2029 and Community Vision 2025-2035 now adopted, we will continue to strive for improvement across all areas of service delivery as we work with and for our community.

The next round of surveys will be conducted in early 2026, where we hope to build on the achievements of this year.

The full results of the 2025 Customer Satisfaction Survey are now available on the City of Ballarat website.