The City of Casey has endorsed its revised Good Governance Framework, reinforcing its commitment to transparent decision-making and strong leadership.
The updated Framework integrates key themes from Council's Shape Your City 2024 community engagement initiative, which saw more than 4,000 contributions from residents. Transparency, leadership, and accountability emerged as top priorities from the engagement, with 816 mentions of transparency and 576 mentions of governance-related leadership.
Key updates to the Framework include:
- Leadership and accountability: Clearer expectations around responsible decision-making.
- Increased transparency: Improved guidance for handling conflicts of interest and making Council decisions more accessible.
- Improved communications: Strengthened systems for internal and external communication, including interactions between Councillors and the community.
- Inclusion of Case Management operations: Ensuring alignment with governance principles.
- Enhanced community engagement: Greater emphasis on involving residents in Council processes.
- Legislative updates: Incorporation of new requirements for publishing Personal Interest Returns.
- Robust review practices: Introduction of regular checks including document lifecycle monitoring, compliance audits, and reviews of delegations and authorisations.
- Staff commitment: An expectation that all staff actively uphold good governance practices.
- Modernised systems: Replacement of outdated processes with updated systems and processes.
"As new Councillors, one of our key priorities has been ensuring good governance, transparency, and proper processes, especially after the well-known issues of the former Council," City of Casey Mayor Cr Stefan Koomen said.
"This framework is a significant step in embedding these principles in everything we do as a Council, and in rebuilding the confidence and trust of our residents after a challenging period for our community.
"Councillors were delighted to work through and pass this milestone document - we see it as a line in the sand for making sure Casey is a benchmark for Councils across Victoria."
Cr Koomen said a good example of Council's commitment to transparency and a commitment to good governance practices is a new interactive insights web page which is now live on Council's Open Data Exchange.
"The web page includes information on Council decisions, how Councillors voted on a particular issue and Council Meeting information," he said.
"The Open Data Exchange is easy to use and is an essential platform for fostering openness, accountability and trust between the local government and the community.
"By having access to this information, community members will stay informed about Council activities, enabling them to actively participate in local governance."
