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SATISFACTION with the City of Greater Bendigo’s performance has plummeted in a number of key areas during a “tumultuous” year.

The annual community survey released on Thursday showed a sharp year-on-year decline in five of the seven performance measures canvassed.

Council’s approval ratings in the “overall performance”, “overall direction” and “customer service” categories all fell eight points to 52, 44 and 63 respectively.

Satisfaction with the council’s role as an advocate for the community tumbled seven points to 49, while its handling of the sealed roads network dropped five points to 56.

The report, compiled from the results of a phone survey of 400 residents on behalf of Local Government Victoria, concluded the council “lags behind” other regional centres.

“With the exception of “community consultation” and “making decisions”, core performance measures are lower in 2016 than in all previous years’ surveys since 2012,” the report said.

“Unfortunately, a decrease in positive ratings combined with an increase in negative ratings on most measures is responsible for declining index scores.”

Former Marong Shire councillor Don McKinnon, who has been an outspoken critic of council’s approach to community consultation, said the poor results were “not a surprise”.

“They’re not listening to the community,” he said. “Hopefully somebody can get the message through to them about what the community think and feel.

“If they keep deteriorating then I suppose, in my opinion, the state government should step in and clean up the mess and put it on its right footing.”

Mayor Rod Fyffe said the report would be “analysed in depth” in a bid to ensure the council was “doing the right thing by our community”.

“The fact that we’ve come through a bit of a tumultuous year has played into it,” he said. “We’ve have the (anti-mosque) demonstrations and the Home and Community Care services [reform].

“But we do need to address a lot of the issues that have been raised.”

CITY of Greater Bendigo CEO Craig Niemann has admitted he is “disappointed” with the results of the annual community survey, but says it should not detract from council’s achievements.

Mr Niemann said the council would take the survey’s findings seriously and work hard to win back the confidence lost in the past year.

“The citizens’ jury is one thing where we are engaging with 24 people who are randomly selected who will be representative of the Greater Bendigo community,” he said.

“We’ll have the opportunity to be provided with a lot of information and make an informed view about where council should be spending money for the community’s future.

“Internally, we’re going to undertake a series of service reviews which will look at what service we deliver, why we deliver it and whether there are better ways to deliver that service.

“That’s an organisational response to say let’s really think about different ways of doing things to make sure we’re providing very good service to the community.”

However, Mr Niemann said it was worth noting about 50 per cent of the people surveyed had not been in direct contact with the council and were basing their opinions merely on perceptions.

“[The results] indicate a decline in the perception of the council’s performance over the last year or two, having said that we still figure well in some areas in terms of state and regional averages,” he said.

“There’s been a lot of public issues for the council over the last couple of years – rallies, conduct panels, difficult decisions around the Kangaroo Flat Leisure Centre and Home and Community Care. 

“We understand the community doesn’t always agree with the council’s decisions.”

Former Bendigo councillor Bruce Phillips said the survey showed that all the state’s councils needed to “lift their game”.

He said some of the the results, particularly around the decline in the public’s satisfaction with council’s advocacy efforts, did not reflect reality.

“People are hard to please,” he said. “I think council has done pretty well when it comes to obtaining money for infrastructure projects – some of which have been built and some of which, including the airport and aquatic centre, are about to be built.

“They’ve got the goals on the board in recent times. The infrastructure that’s been built in this city in the last 10 years, well, it’s never been as great since the 1850s.”