As part of the financial sustainability project, Council is undertaking a prioritised service review program.
What is a service review?
A service review is a review of an organisation's services designed to identify potential service delivery improvements. A Service Review can be used to improve the organisation's efficiency and effectiveness and assists in addressing financial sustainability. Local government is one of the largest providers of services for the community. Councils have progressively taken on greater responsibilities for delivering services as community expectations have grown and other levels of government have devolved various functions. By systematically reviewing its services, Council can redesign its mix of services, achieve efficiency gains and generate additional income.
Services reviewed so far this year include:
Services currently under review are:
- Family day care
- Legal services
- Communications and media
- Customer experience
- Bereavement services
- Asset Custodian model (review how our assets are managed across Council teams)
Other reviews planned, are:
- Holiday Haven
- Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre
Results of service reviews will be captured through financial sustainability reporting to Council.
Since February 2023, Council has been establishing an Enterprise Project Management Office (ePMO) to set strict budget controls and parameters for projects to ensure they are efficient and enduring.
As part of the 2024-25 draft budget preparation, the ePMO received requests for critical capital projects. The ePMO reviewed all potential capital projects to ensure that the project has a defined scope, objective, benefit, and funding. They also check that the project has risks, stakeholders and dependencies identified. The critical capital works have been categorised into Categories 1, 2 and 3:
- Category 1 - Essential works required to meet minimum road renewals, urgent renewals of other asset types and critical grant co-contributions. “Required to keep the lights on”.
- Category 2 - Next most urgent renewals to meet Council’s basic obligations, fund other secured grant co-contributions and provide for urgent reactive capital works.
- Category 3 - Still urgent renewals including some more commercially focused projects and compliance attainment.
This ensures that the most urgent capital works are prioritised and allocated available funding.
The available funds to allocate to general fund capital projects in Council’s 2024-25 draft capital budget has been impacted by Council’s challenging financial position. (Draft Delivery Program Operational Plan and Budget 2024-25)
New systems are being put in place to improve and enable strict controls on the budget process.
Some of these activities include setting strict budget measures and the establishment of a project management framework with milestone checkpoints to meet budget criteria.
What is changing
So far this year, we have been working to improve how Council builds its budget. The 2024-25 draft budget was prepared using a bottom-up budget process. This approach provides a realistic budget that is reflective of the cost incurred to deliver our current services at the current agreed service level. It also ensures all costs required to meet legislative requirements are adequately budgeted for. This results in a draft 2024-25 operating deficit which is larger than Council’s previous budget, however, is in line with the historical actual results achieved by Council.
Decisions so far