Council-under-administration was top of the pops as the most complained about council to the NSW Ombudsman again.
That makes it five years in a row.
With 121 in total, the complaints were a rate of 35 per 100,000 residents last financial year.
It was better than the previous year when 158 complaints made it a rate of 48 per 100,000.
The Ombudsman said the most frequently raised issues in actionable complaints about local government in 2022–23 included:
• standards of customer service
• complaint-handling processes
• complaint outcomes
• merits/reasoning of council decisions
• council enforcement action.
As well as complaints to the Ombudsman, more people complained directly to Council last financial year.
It received 301 complaints directly to its service centre.
That number has continued to grow this financial year with a 52% increase in community complaints compared to Q2 F22/23.
Council said a main contributor to this was a 155 per cent increase in complaints to Environment and Planning.
A third of these were complaining about delays and lack of communication over development application assessments.
Council also received 138 formal GIPA (Government information public access) requests last financial year and more than 1300 informal requests for information.
See last year’s story here.
