2025/26 Budget endorsed
The budget and related documents were endorsed at the 10 June Council Meeting. Check out the news item for the media story.
Feedback received from the community over the past year, including the community survey in late 2024, informed the Draft Budget for 2025-2026. We value all feedback and submissions from our community members throughout the year.
Draft budget highlights and engagement
Council’s proposed Budget allocation includes:
- Maintaining our roads, footpaths, and trails ($25 million)
- Improving and maintaining parks, trees, sporting facilities, bushlands and reserves ($23 million)
- Caring for the environment and responding to climate change, including emergency management ($6 million)
- Programs and activities to support the community through all stages of life such as services offered at Sherbrooke Children's Centre and the Best Start program ($17 million)
Examples of specific highlights include:
- Lillydale Lake improvements - $1.076 million
- Township improvements such as cleaning, weeding, mulching etc - $900,000
- Playspace renewals at Bimbadeen Reserve, Mooroolbark, Kemp Reserve, Mt Evelyn and Mt Evelyn Recreation Reserve - $258,000 each
- Delivery of Warburton Mountain Bike Destination trails - $2.478 million (external grant)
- Ngurrak barring $2.1million (external grant)
- Yarra Valley Trail - $3.95 million (external grant)
- 150 Cambridge Rd parkland development - $300,000
- Upwey Main Oval sports field rehabilitation works $600,000
Our community has continued to highlight the importance of improving and maintaining drains to mitigate flooding. This work continues, including a $3.92 million allocation for drainage improvements in the 2025-26 Draft Budget.
Frequently asked questions
Details in the final budget
- What am I getting for my rates?
- What about essential infrastructure?
- Tell me more about the funding for services
- What are the priority projects?
- What are some of the efficiencies Council has made?
What makes up the budget?
- What does Council have to consider when setting its budget?
- What is CPI?
- What other factors contribute to Council costs?
- Why do I have to pay rates?
How does this impact me?
Initial community engagement
An important step in setting our annual budget is considering community voice. There are many ways we seek to hear from our community and recently you have told us, through ongoing consultations, that you want us to focus on the foundations - roads, drainage and rubbish, and look after our existing assets.
To help make sure we have the best understanding about what is most important to you, and to help us prioritise the types of projects and services that matter most to our community, we created a survey covering the following key areas:
- Advocacy (to other levels of goverment);
- Financial levers (mechanisms we can use); and
- Valued services and infrastructure.
This information was combined with other feedback, including the recent community engagement from the Shape your future project, to ensure we are clear on what is most valued by the community. We are looking closely at the above key areas, considering the challenges facing our community and organisation and recognise that changes may need to be made over the next few years, to support Council's long term financial position.
Click the button below to see a summary of the survey results.