2016-10-17 General Committee Meeting Notes

GENERAL COMMITTEE MEETING AGENDA                                             17 OCTOBER 2016


Our People
   In relation to WH&S, our performance is improving and as CEO, I am now comfortable that
     we are getting on top of our WH&S issues. Our WH&S staff have made good progress in
     recent months with our required policies, procedures etc which would now pass WH&S
     audit standards for some of the criteria that we have reviewed. We are probably still about
     12 months or so away from achieving 72% in an independent WH&S audit for all aspects of
     compliance but that is the goal.
   Our WH&S scheme rate has increased over the last 3 years but is still lower than many
     other Councils in category D (similar Councils to Noosa Council). The best performing
     Council in that category has a scheme rate of 0.905% while the worst is 2.083%. The
     scheme rate is expressed as a percentage of total wages.
   Personal leave increased in August in particular as we had a flu / virus ripple through the
     organisation with some staff being off for up to a week or more. We normally have a
     higher sick leave during the winter period but the recent flu was particularly nasty.
   Our staff turnover rate remains low compared to other Councils.

Our Customers
   The total number of customer requests received by Council remains on an upward trend in
     the long term. This is consistent with the experience of other Councils. The Australian
     Centre of Excellence for Local Government has recently published a paper on “Giving
     Local Government the Re-Boot”. This paper identified that Australia wide this trend is
     occurring. Communities are requesting more and more from their local councils and that
     trend has been steadily increasing in recent times. This is putting pressure on local
     governments to keep increasing the range and levels of services to keep up with
     community demands. This is not an issue specific to Noosa Council.
   The level of sign off of completed CRMs (customer request management system) is
     continuing to improve and is ahead of where we were last year. More work has been done
     at the management level in “drilling down” within the overall statistics to ensure that
     completed requests are “signed off”. The Planning and Infrastructure Department has
     made good progress with their new procedures to improve the monitoring and close off of
     CRMs with a particular focus on trees and traffic requests. The level of customer
     complaints remains relatively low compared to the number of requests.
   The average wait time for our customers when phoning Council continues to improve over
     time and our month to month performance is generally better than the last two years. New
     casual staff have recently commenced on the frontline customer area and we saw a spike
     in phone calls in July associated with the rates period.
   Customer indicators for processing times for various types of development applications
     have remained relatively constant over the 3 month period but September saw the best
     result achieved for quite some time which is an excellent effort by the Town Planning
     Team.
   The average time to process building and plumbing applications is still meeting statutory
     timeframes.

Our Finances
   Our financial KPIs measure solvency, investment performance and outstanding rates. All
     of these KPIs continue to be on track.
   Council receives a financial performance report at the end of each month which provides a
     more detailed analysis of Council’s financial position. Council receives a detailed report on
     capital works progress every quarter.


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