10 Year Capital Works Plan Community Panel

In 2013, the Council of the City of Greater Geraldton decided to develop a more rigorous process to allocate the funding for their Capital Works Projects that included the voice of the people. In the 2013/14 financial year the City budgeted a net operating loss of $5.97M and decided it would develop a plan to reach a breakeven position by the year 2022. To move towards this goal, it became apparent that many community needs and aspirations would be unlikely to be delivered within the short term, without significant increases in rates or reduction in expenses.

Given the complexity of long term infrastructure planning, a comprehensive deliberation process was developed based on participatory budgeting. A Community Panel, consisting of a 28 randomly sampled members of the community met over four full Saturdays to determine a priority list of projects for inclusion in the City’s ten year capital works plan (estimated ceiling of $68milliion available for Capital Works over the ten years), as well as a set of criteria (used to determine that ranking), that could be applied by the City for assessing future capital works.

The Community Panel was a joint undertaking by CGG and Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute. The #changesCGGcommunity Project Team who delivered the workshop series comprised of a cross departmental team of CGG executives, a range of managers, coordinators and project officers totalling 28 and two CUSP members.

The Final Report of the Community Panel deliberations was handed to the Mayor at the regular meeting of Council on 17 December 2013. The Panel recommended a prioritised list of both City and Community initiated capital works projects and a set of criteria with a rating system. They also recommended that both the City and Panel criteria be applied separately to each project, resulting in two separate columns of a City rank and a Community rank.

Additionally, the Panel recommended a plan for future community participation through their continued involvement in the 10 Year Capital works budgetary allocation, as well as future two-four yearly random sample Community Panels. Council endorsed the combined final ranking of the capital works plan in February 2014.

Read the 10 Year Capital Works Plan - Report and Recommendations.

View the video here