Have a say on City of Karratha performance

Once again, your council is holding its annual community survey, when we ask everyone across all our towns to assess our performance over the past year and tell us in what areas you think we need to do more.

This survey is very important because the responses we receive identify the areas you think require more work and investment from us.

This enables us to develop an appropriate budget for the following year so we can direct the council’s funding to the areas you think need it most.

We have been doing the survey in this format since 2012 and in it, we ask you both what you expect from us and the importance you place on our 26 service areas.

Then we examine the gap between the importance you put on each of these services and our perceived performance.

Those services with the larger gaps are the ones on which we need to invest time and money.

As an example of how this works, in 2013 footpaths and cycleways showed the largest service gap with a negative differential of 20 per cent.

The council therefore decided to increase its expenditure in this area and committed $700,000 a year for new paths.

Three years later, in the 2016 community survey, our performance in this area was a positive 5 per cent — an increase of 25 per cent.

We mean it when we say we take notice of the community.

I’m proud to say more than 60 per cent of last year’s respondents thought the City of Karratha was a good or excellent place to live, and those with no plans to leave increased to more than 40 per cent — a big increase on the 14 per cent recorded in 2011.

Online submissions for this year’s community survey opened on Friday and remain open until the end of the month.

I encourage everyone to visit our website, karratha.wa.gov. au/survey, or our Facebook page to have your say and encourage your friends and family to have their say too.