The 2024/2025 Budget will continue to deliver the goals set out in the Council Plan (Mir wimbul) 2021-2025. The Council Plan along with the Financial Plan and the Community Vision were developed through the Imagine Greater Bendigo project which asked for feedback from the community over nine months.

The City uses your rates to pay for core services that provide everyday value – like early morning street cleaning and bin collections, looking after the City’s extensive transport network, maintaining our fantastic parks and gardens, staging major events, caring for dogs and cats at Bendigo Animal Relief Centre and much more.

We have a smaller part of the Budget that is divided annually between new projects. We’re asking you to help us understand your priorities for that part of the Budget.

It’s important to keep in mind that the City has to fund all of the below services to some degree. The dollar value listed against each service below represents how each $100 of rates is currently spent.

$18	Roads, bridges and drainage
$15	Waste, recycling and resource recovery
$14	City operations and governance
$12	Community buildings and property maintenance
$10	Parks, gardens and open spaces
$7	Community sport, recreation and pools
$5	Art, culture and libraries
$5	Tourism and economic development
$4	Community wellbeing, partnerships and early years
$3	Footpaths, tracks and trails
$2	Town planning
$2	Customer experience and communications
$2	Community safety
$1	Climate action and environment

Your involvement at the start of the Budget process is an opportunity for us to check-in with you. Tell us what priorities you would like considered when Councillors are allocating funding or advocating for new or multi-year projects and initiatives.

Our Budget public engagement this year includes a new 'funding' slider where you get to select how you would fund service areas if you were in charge of the Budget.

How does this help? This activity will provide Council with a wide range of insights on what you value in the community. When putting the Budget together, all feedback will be collated and reviewed alongside other considerations, such as our funding commitments for services, infrastructure, and ongoing projects. All new priorities in the next Budget must also be aligned to the Council Plan and existing strategies.

Councillors meet with the community in a number of ways, including at Listening Posts; events and a range of committees. Councillors will be guided by all of this information during the development of the 2024/2025 Budget in the new year (see timeline).