Warrnambool council's sharp decline in survey performance 'a wake-up call'

Support for the council took a hit in this year's annual survey on the back of controversial decisions to close the city's saleyards and explore moving the art gallery to Cannon Hill.

During Monday's council meeting - which was hit with technical glitches - councillors promised to strive to improve their standing in the public's eyes over the next year.

Internet issues plagued the meeting with the livestream being stopped several times.

Cr Angie Paspaliaris said after its unusually high scores in the 2022 survey, the latest results had brought the council back "down to earth a little bit".

She said it was telling the two worst affected areas were community consultation and making community decisions.

The community's perception of the direction the council was heading was the steepest decline, dropping 27 per cent.

Community consultation dropped 18 per cent, sealed local roads were down 17 per cent and overall council performance fell 16 per cent.

Cr Ben Blain said the survey showed "we have to do better" and "communication is key".

He said the low rates - even if on the back of two decisions from last year - were because of the way consultation was done and communication hadn't been done well.

"It's really something we need to understand why we failed and we need to learn from. We will get better and we will improve the perception of council moving forward," Cr Blain said.

"I think this is a really important wake-up call to council."

Mayor Debbie Arnott said there was no doubt the result was disappointing.

"We need to do better in some areas," she said.

"The area that we really do need to look at is our community engagement and how we convey our decisions and the reasons behind our decisions to our community.

"We need to look forward now and we need to focus on those areas of communication and hopefully improve our standing within the community again."

Cr Vicki Jellie acknowledged the results and said as a council it needed to strive to do better.

"There is no doubt that the community consultation process of Warrnambool City Council needs to take on a new direction," she said.

Cr Jellie said consultation needed to markedly improve.

Cr Richard Ziegeler said the survey was disappointingly lower than it had been in past years on many of the measures which was probably due to the various controversial decisions the council had to make.

"The public generally isn't discerning if they're dissatisfied with one or two big unpopular decisions and they basically just slam council as a whole," Cr Ziegeler said. "I think that's probably the reason."

Cr Max Taylor said, in hindsight, now the closure of the saleyards and proposed relocation of the art gallery were behind them, the council could look forward to more positive survey results in the near future.

Cr Paspaliaris said members of the public felt very passionate about certain issues.

"I think it is also important to note that it is a measure of community's perceptions of council's performance. It's not council's actual performance," she said.

Cr Paspaliaris also said the council needed to strive to improve its community consultation processes.

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