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Strategic Community Plan 2025 - 2035

This year’s Budget is centred around the adoption of our Strategic Community Plan 2025 – 2035 Your Voice - Our Future. We engaged extensively with the community over many months to understand what they love about Greater Geraldton and where they want to see our community grow.

The community nominated:

• Greener suburbs and enhanced natural areas
• An engaged community that is safe
• A sustainable and diverse economy
• Steadfast leadership and advocacy

These focus areas will be at the core of our services, events, initiatives and programs over the next 10 years, and the Annual Budget and Long Term Financial Plan are in place to support these actions.

Creating equity in the community

To maintain a balance, the City has reverted from a single GRV rating category to two distinct categories: residential and non-residential. This means that the business community are taking a share of the responsibility, and it’s not solely left to residents. This option increases equity in the community, and the average increase to rates paid by residential properties (excluding minimums) will be around $77.

Why are my rates higher than my neighbours?

Landgate determine property valuations (Gross Rental Value or Unimproved Value) – if you have experienced an increase to your rates, it is most likely that your property has gone up in value.

Below is a summary of the average (%) property GRV valuation movements per land use as determined by Landgate and will take effect from 1 July 2025:

• Residential (excluding vacant land) – 39.36%
• Non-residential (excluding vacant land) – 16.58%
• UV (excluding vacant Land) – 19.73%

The rate-in-the-dollar for each category has been adjusted down to account for these significant movements in valuations. Rate payers can contact Landgate’s Customer Experience team to discuss further via 9273 7373.

Do we have to increase rates?

For the City to maintain our locality’s roads, footpaths and cycleways, parks and playgrounds, sporting facilities, waste management and youth and leisure services, and continue providing the services the community requires, there must be an increase to rates to ensure our locality is financially sustainable and to bolster any grant funding we receive. Rate increases have all been below 4% these last few years to reduce cost-of-living pressures and as such a lot of our budget heavily focuses around renewals.