2025 Noosa Council Community Satisfaction Survey Results

Frank Wilkie87:47

Councillor Wilson, don't cross the line into animal cruelty. That's a fine line. That would be broken the Standing Orders. Can I have a move and a seconder for this committee recommendation regarding the Royal Mail Hotel, please? No. Move, Councillor Stockwell. Second, Councillor Phillips. All in favour? Yes. That's carried. All Councillors but Councillor Wilson. May we get Councillor Wilson back to the meeting, please. She's back, welcome back Councillor Wilson. Next item is Planning & Environment Court appeal number D92 of 2025, application for a Material Change of Use for a dwelling house 58 Seaview Terrace, Sunshine Beach. Next item, financial performance 2025. Report, October 2020. Next item, operational plan 2025-26 quarterly reporting. Next item, confidential contract award reporting. Report contract number CN 25113 western bannum Western Batter Missing Link Capping Construction. Next item is another confidential item, not for public release. Planning and environment report PLD44-2025. Application for material change for food and drink outlay and short-term accommodation at 203,207 Gympie Terrace, Noosaville. We have a mover and a seconder for the general community recommendation to be adopted except we're dealt with separately, please. I'm happy to move. Councillor Phillips, seconded by Councillor Lorentson. All in favour? Thank you. That's carried. Kali. Yes. We have two reports direct to the audience. To the Ordinary Meeting. Item 12.1 is the 2025 Noosa Council Community Satisfaction Survey results, and we have Director Community Services, Kerri Contini, here to give summary of the report. Thank you, Kerri. Thank you, Councillors.

We're just going to share a screen here and bring up. Awesome. Thank you, Councillors. This evening we're really pleased to present the results from our Community Satisfaction Survey 2025. The satisfaction survey provides a comprehensive. Overview of residents' opinions on Council's performance and priorities. The results serve as a key measure of how well Council meets community needs and expectations. The findings highlight Council's strengths and reveal areas for improvement. The survey. Helps guide our governance, our customer service, our strategic planning and our operations. Certainly. Thank you. And as well, importantly, it helps us in allocating resources. The feedback covers a wide range of community Council services and, most importantly, supports informed, future-focused decision-making. Time that we conducted a Community Satisfaction Survey was in 2021, and we had a history of participating in the LGAQ-coordinated community satisfaction surveys. However, those approaches used a very traditional. Approach, which was landline telephone surveys. And those, obviously, are very challenging to deliver these days. Our last survey took over 5,000 phone calls to get the required sample size. So, confronted. With these challenges, the team have done a fantastic job in actually exploring what contemporary models are, and partnered with our. With Facebook, who are our trusted. Of survey space. And through this, we have piloted, with Facebook, a digital-first approach, which replaces the outdated landline surveys with randomised email invitations and targeted social media to ensure that we that have an a inclusive survey that is representative of our ABS profile. This has enabled a broader demographic reach, it's reduced costs, it's improved accessibility, and most importantly, it us a rich and reliable data. Has the added benefit of being able to relate to liveability areas and data. The survey was administered by PlaceScore between 28 April and 23 May 2025. It 50 assessed. Service areas grouped in five dimensions: community programs, community places, transport waste and water, management of communications and planning for the future. It achieved a representative sample of 398 residents and for a population of our size, the required sample size is 382. The margin of error is plus /minus 5% at 95% confidence and residents and ratepayers were invited to participate aged 15 years and over. To the most important aspect, the results. I'll just go through a couple of the overview results and then Emma and I are just going show you a little bit of the portal so that you can get a sense of the difference between how we used to receive the survey, which was just a PDF copy of a lot of graphs, to the ability now that we have. To really interrogate and draw out samples to assist with our understanding of our community. The overall satisfaction was that the Council rated 79% performance as either good, very good, or average. Important to note that this was a different methodology from our previous surveys, so this is a much improved contemporary methodology. So while the results are completely comparable, places. Place4 have done a fantastic job of adjusting previous methodologies to be able to give us some comparison. And that suggests that there's a 14% decline in overall satisfaction since 2021. Now what we also understand is that is similar to other local governments and other government levels generally that are facing declining levels of satisfaction amongst issues of potential mistrust with government and increasing expectations. The performance scores about individual service areas ranged from satisfaction levels of 58% through to 99% and I think really positively 27 or 54% of the 50 service areas scored a very high level of satisfaction at 80% or above. So it was a fantastic result for those areas. Our top performers and this is for the full survey running, we'd like to services which for satisfaction rating of 99% so they've been given that KPI of next time getting the extra 1%. Waste management scoring 95% and our community places area was the highest leading dimension at 88%. This survey also looks at priorities. What are the communities, I guess, areas of importance right now and their priorities for Council in the coming two years? And those included value for money for rents, parks and public spaces, road maintenance and transparent decision making. I think one of the interesting aspects of this survey is that, and we'll be able to show you this in a moment, that we included a don't know element. Of you will be familiar with a scale in a survey from one to five, and for those people that don't know a service, aren't quite sure what we're talking about, or don't have a strong opinion, we'll often pick the middle, which can sometimes cloud surveys. Results. So we included a don't know, so that those elements could be removed from the calculations of satisfaction, and that's been quite instrumental in us understanding what our community actually knows about our services, and what the true level of satisfaction is by the people that actually know our service. The, so. Emma, if I can ask you to go, let's jump into service performance. Fantastic. So I think what are we sitting on there? We've got a breakdown. So it breaks it down and it's a little bit difficult to see on this the screen we'll be able to see that in front of them. It breaks it down as I said across five dimension areas and ten service areas in each dimension. So that's a total of 50 service dimensions. Previously we only surveyed so it's giving us a much thorough understanding of our services. It enables us importantly, and this is the big difference from the previous service, we can now go in and interrogate. So for example we could look at ages and start to see the difference in what ages might be rating. So, Emma, if you want to just choose maybe over 64. Start to see, for example, that. You can certainly see the grey section, which is the don't knows. And you can see, for example, it's quite understanding that over 64s wouldn't have a good knowledge of potentially our youth services. But in this. Sample size here, we've got 36% of our over 64s who don't know about our programs for our older residents. Those that do know them, though, rate them very highly at 88%. So this gives us a really good opportunity to go out and help market, help promote and educate to enable our community. To better understand the services that we offer. Another aspect that we have is to be able to look at it from a geographic dimension. And really help understand what our different level. Our different areas, what's important to them and what is. Their performance and satisfaction ratings are. So we, for example, have a look at Boreen Point. And you start to see the differences there around what different communities are seeing as performing highly for them. And we might choose another dimension. Maybe we have a look at. The ones we want some roads in it. Thanks, Ellen. So you can start to then see here for Boreen Point road maintenance, you know, we've got a growing dissatisfaction in things like road maintenance. So you can see here we're looking at graphs. It enables us to actually download all of that data so that we can actually dive very deeply into it. And we've had a lot of training with our staff across the organisation and we can already see them starting to use it to help understand what the priorities should be. If we just jump into service priorities I think is where we'll go to. Right. So this area is quite interesting. It enables us, you know, when we do surveys and we ask people what is important, people will often tell us everything is important. With this survey we forced a say what are your three most important things at the moment for Council. This process now, what the portal does is it enables us to bring together satisfaction as well as importance to help Council understand. Well, what should we be trying to focus on and what this chart is showing is that anything that would appear in the red area is very urgent this is what the community is saying is performing very and is very very important to them now it's really pleasing that for Council there is nothing in the red area but in that orange area in the middle there are a range of things such as providing value for money for rates Council making decisions in the best interest of the community road maintenance and condition and a range of others but this is one for example if we chose once again let's choose Boreen Point and see we can start to see the differences in community communities and what might be you know more of a priority to that community and that starts to change around slightly if we since Pat you're here thank you very much let's have a look at Cooroy shall we. We start to see you can see that each of those numbers moving around starts to represent you know different areas of priority for our community particularly it enables us to look at different ages and so for example if we look at our under 25 you'll need to. And we start to see that we actually in under 25s we have something that has popped into the red and that is around provision and maintenance of public toilets and so for our young people who are out and about visiting our parks they're downtown they're riding their bikes they're riding them safely that public toilets are a thing that's very important to them. So this gives us an example of how we can delve deeply into the data to be able to help us understand where we should be prioritising our efforts. The survey also in our a free text field and we had the vast majority, I think 345 of the 398 respondents provided information here. Provided the information that into we needed able that to free text field, which once again helps us understand below the numbers what the community wants us to focus on. So the next survey that we will run will be at the end of 2026 which will enable us to benchmark against this survey. As we are the first Council to come through this survey process, we don't have directly comparable other local governments that we can benchmark against. However, many councils are lined up behind us and as they come through, that's the fantastic thing about it being online, we will be to able get those comparable results. I just want to really acknowledge PlaceScore, they were fantastic to work with. A pilot is always a challenge. We've all learnt along the way. It was a little bit like the days where you could only have so many characters in a text and we had to reduce our description. Down to fit a certain character with, which was quite interesting, getting everybody to agree. I'd also very much like to acknowledge the team led by Emma. It was a fantastic, it was a long journey, a brave one. To take a different approach and now we've got, you know, we're already telling other councils who want to understand how we've been able to deliver this and we're trying to move away from telephone surveys as well. So I'll present the report to you. To take any questions.

Amelia Lorentson112:03

I do, actually. Thank you, Mayor. I think the report provides a really important snapshot on how our communities and where please us. The priorities lie. There's lots of areas of genuine strength, and we heard our Director, Kerri Contini, outline those. And our libraries, our oases, our parks, our community wellbeing programs, they perform extremely well. And that's a dedication result of the, you know, the dedication and the excellent staff of these teams. But again, when I look at these surveys, I sort of just go, what are the red flags? Where are the opportunities for improvement? Sort of just outlined again, value for money, transparent decision making, road maintenance, parking and planning for the future. Basically the most important issues and they're also the most important. Priority issues, but they're also the same areas amongst some of our lowest performers. And probably the last one I really want to make is what I've just mentioned before, that I don't think that we should be looking at these results in isolation. On Monday, the. General Committee, we looked at the operational report. Last month, we had the CEO report. In August, we had the staff wellness survey. And I just think that those. You look at those, they highlighted high workloads, vacancies, skill shortages, overtime pressures. And I just think that you need. It's reasonable for us to consider that internal capacity. Challenges may be contributing to some of the external satisfaction reflected in the community survey. And I keep, you know, I feel like a broken record sometimes that if staff are stretched or struggling, then the service quality inevitably suffers. So, again, I would love to see some overlay of data or some integration of. Like, staff wellbeing metrics being included in the survey to get a complete picture of organisational health. And I think that is going to give us a more complete data set when we come into budget deliberations and strategic direction.

Karen Finzel104:43

Yes, I do you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. It's a great pleasure to hear the report this evening and celebrate that libraries are at the top and not to mention arts, culture and heritage. Yay! I'd like to speak from the heart of who we are here tonight, not just as locals sharing streets, beaches and bushland, but as a community connected by something deeper, a love of place and a belief in the power we hold when we act together. The recent Community Satisfaction Survey reminded us that while we celebrate much, the beauty we protect, the services we rely on, the resilience. We've shown is the true message, not the numbers. Although they do count, but I'm speaking from the heart. It was the story behind them, a story that says we care. About how treat we live here, each other. And how we safeguard what makes Noosa extraordinary. But caring is only the beginning. What this moment asks of us is responsibility. A shared responsibility to shape a future that reflects not fear or division, but collaboration. Trust and hope. A future built not by a single voice, but by a chorus of many. Every one of us holds the power of Noosa's story. The long-time custodians, the families who arrived last year, the kids whose footprints in the sand are still small. These stories matter. Not one that is, sorry, one that is not their own, but in how they weave together to guide our choices, our priorities and our legacy that we leave behind. So I encourage everyone tonight to step forward, not waiting for others to leave, but recognising that leadership lives in each of us. Let us listen more deeply, speak more generously and show up more often. Let us turn concern into action, passion into participation, and ideas into shared solutions. Because the Noosa we dream of, protected, connected and thriving, is inherit, something we inherit, not is just something we inherit. Something we build together. Thank you.

Amelia Lorentson109:23

Oh, hi Kerri, a lot of background noise. So again, I hope you can hear me. Given that there has been a noticeable decline in community satisfaction, has Council analysed whether any of the issues raised? Think the issues raised correlate with the findings from the recent staff wellness survey. And where I'm going to with that is some of the low-performing service areas such as roads and, you know, decision-making, transparency, customer service, that type of thing. Are they areas where staff have reported resourcing, workload or morale issues?