Council Plan 2025-29

Streets Alive Yarra offers the following suggestions for the:

Council Plan 2025-29
10-Year Financial Plan
10-Year Asset Plan
Community Infrastructure Plan

We suggest that the content of the existing Council Plan 2021-25 should be broadly retained, with adjustments to:

accelerate parking reform, to ensure that people who need to drive and park are able to find a vacant parking bay and avoid a fine
deliver a new wombat crossing each month
deliver a new pocket park each quarter
deliver an additional 3 km of protected bike lanes each year
adopt best-practice requirements for crossovers
re-build 20 km of footpaths each year (including crossovers) to improve their width and flatness
prohibit all footpath parking
provide continuous footpaths across all side streets that front collector streets
deliver 1,000 mobility and access zones across Yarra, each with a loading bay, a disabled parking bay, a car share bay, a corral for shared e-scooters, and a hangar for private bikes
eliminate parking mandates from the planning scheme, because they increase the cost of housing and deprive individuals of freedom of choice
allocate $10 million per year for walking, biking, trees, and place making
convert each block into a High Access Neighbourhood with traffic calming and modal filters
accelerate Yarra’s Geographical Information Systems project by enrolling volunteers to populate the GIS database, to provide an open-access evidence base to guide the prioritisation of investment
commit to publishing each report received from an external consultant, within 2 months of receipt, unless Councillors have designated it as a confidential report (this should be rare)
publish a complete organisational chart, including each role’s title, remuneration band, and detailed role description, and the total number of people underneath each manager (or coordinator, or team leader)

10-Year Financial Plan

We suggest that the content of the existing 10-Year Financial Plan should be broadly retained, with adjustments:

Accelerate the development, adoption and implementation of a revised Kerbside and Parking Management Strategy that requires commuters to pay for all-day parking, and uses market-clearing pricing, which will have an ancillary effect of raising tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.

10-Year Asset Plan

We suggest that the content of the existing 10-Year Asset Plan should be broadly retained, with a revision to commit to maintaining a publicly viewable Asset List within the Asset Management Plan, covering the next 50 years, including data on:

the identity of each asset, i.e. each building, street or park is a separately listed asset
the estimated lifetime of that asset, i.e. typical number of years between renewals; e.g. buildings need a new roof every XX years, high-traffic streets need re-sheeting every YY years, low-traffic streets need re-sheeting every ZZ years
date the asset was last renewed, e.g. when was the roof last replaced, or the oval re-turfed
dates for planned renewals, e.g. for buildings: roof, cladding, paint, HVAC, kitchen

We acknowledge that such a list may contain hundreds of items.

Community Infrastructure Plan

We suggest that the content of the existing Community Infrastructure Plan should be broadly retained, with adjustments:

Offer a bookable meeting room (e.g. for clubs & societies) in each neighbourhood
Demolish and re-build Richmond Library as a 6-storey building using classic architecture

Conclusion

Streets Alive Yarra would be pleased to meet and discuss the details of this submission.

Published 10th December 2025