Road conditions, waste management and the arts have emerged as the top grievances of Corangamite Shire Council residents.
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About 400 interviews conducted for the Community Satisfaction Survey between January 27 to March 14 revealed a decline in a number of council's core performance measures including:
- Art centres and libraries (Rating of 68, five points lower than the statewide average)
- The condition of sealed local roads (49, four points lower)
- Waste management (67, one point lower)
- Maintenance of unsealed roads - particularly in the shire's north (39, two points lower).
South-central ward councillor Jo Beard said many of the roads in question were not council-owned assets.
"The sealing of local roads has been a real bug bear of mine, it has been every year," Cr Beard said.
"It's usually not our roads people are knocking - it's an arterial road network. Our community doesn't always know which one belongs to who."
In the budget for the 2022-23 financial year an expenditure of $7.62 million was assigned to road maintenance as part of the council's capital works program.
South-west ward councillor Kate Makin said the council should be proud of what it had achieved, despite being initially surprised at the results.
The council's overall performance scored 66 which was down from the previous year but was seven points higher than the state average. Customer service was the highest performing core measure at 78 points.
"When we first got this report we were all a bit like, 'damn, we've gone down in our status'," Cr Makin said.
"But as always the customer service has been going above and beyond, they're up again in a couple of points so it just shows everyone loves talking to the people on the phones at the office in Corangamite Shire.
"We should be quite proud of what we've achieved, we are a council that is punching above its weight and we can show lots of other councils around the state how to do it.
"Even though we've taken a little bit of a dip, everyone across the state has so we can't be too hard on ourselves."
Executive services and governance coordinator James Plozza reiterated the council's overall performance had remained strong despite the dips.
"Overall across the state there has been a slight fall in satisfaction, this is something we've seen sector-wide with both the overall average and large rural shire average experiencing a down year to the relative high year of 2021," Mr Plozza said.
"Council has experienced a fall broadly in-line with its overall result, but it still performs very strongly relatively to its peers."
