This consultation is closed. We used your feedback to help inform our 2019/20 budget.

We'd like to thank our community for providing more than 500 suggestions and 150 formal submissions about our 2019/20 budget. This feedback helped us create a budget that supports the services and facilities that our growing community needs.

About our budget

Our newly adopted budget for 2019/20 supports services like immunisation, childcare and kindergarten. It funds our parks, libraries and leisure centres, and supports our business and creative communities. It enables us to plan for sustainable growth, harness new technologies, improve our network of roads, and much more.

It was formally adopted by Council on Tuesday 25 June 2019, along with Council’s strategic resources plan and long term financial strategy. View the full resolution.

The budget drives our vision to become a more sustainable city. Having moved to 100% renewable electricity in our own operations, we are now empowering our community to make an even bigger difference. Our upcoming Climate Emergency Plan will help everyone in Yarra reduce their carbon emissions.

The budget also supports our response to the recycling crisis gripping our state. We are expanding our successful food and green waste trial to include a separate glass collection. This will improve the quality of recycling and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

We’re continuing to build bicycle infrastructure like the Wellington Street separated bike lane to encourage healthy and sustainable transport. And we are expanding our tree planting and management program by 25%. The climate emergency is one of our biggest challenges, and this year’s budget takes concrete steps to address it.

Budget at a glance

  • $188.9m total operating expenditure
  • $31.3m for capital works projects and other new initiatives
  • $2.1m for community grants
  • 2.5% increase in general rate revenue (in line with the State Government rate cap)
  • 2.5% increase in Yarra's additional rate rebate for pensioners (now $187.10)

View a snapshot of the many important services supported by the budget.

Budget highlights

This budget includes $31m for capital works, including:

  • $2.4m for upgrades to facilities at Ryan’s Reserve and Kevin Bartlett Reserve, Richmond
  • $2.1m for community grants (supporting 150+ community-building projects)
  • $1.4m for traffic and safety initiatives in Abbotsford, North Fitzroy and Richmond
  • $1m for trees throughout Yarra (a $200,000 increase from last year)
  • $900,000+ for bicycle infrastructure across Yarra, including completing the bike lane in Wellington Street, Collingwood

Budget breakdown

This year’s budget includes $189m in total operating expenditure. About 59% of our operating budget comes from rates and charges.

  • Infrastructure and asset management - $17m (9% of the budget)
  • Waste and recycling - $19m (10%)
  • Strategic and statutory planning - $7.4m (4%)
  • Construction management - $3.2m (1%)
  • Customer service - $3.1m (1%)
  • Family, youth and children’s services – $18.3m (10%)
  • Aged and disability services – $6.8m (4%)
  • Library services - $5.9m (3%)
  • Leisure, arts, culture and venues – $14.2m (8%)
  • Parks and recreation – $8.3m (4%)
  • Compliance, parking and traffic – $20.8m (11%)
  • Strategic transport and sustainability - $4.1m (2%)
  • Advocacy, engagement and communications - $7.1m (4%)
  • Finance, performance, systems and people – $21.3 (12%)
  • Governance – $7.7m (4%)
  • Interest, depreciation, amortisation – $24.8m (13%)

The full adopted budget will be posted on our budget page.

A decade of improvement

Community satisfaction with the services funded by our budget is at a 10-year high (independent survey by Metropolis Research).

Our community rated our overall performance as “very good” (7.3 out of 10) and our services and facilities as “excellent” (7.93). Our top rated services were our weekly garbage collection (8.74 out of 10) and our local libraries (8.67), both rated “excellent”. All of these scores are well above the average for metropolitan Melbourne.

Visit our full survey results.