Drop in Dubbo council complaints for 2022/23 financial year

The Code of Conduct complaints were among the items on the agenda at the Dubbo Regional Council meeting on Thursday night.

For the financial year, $5,597 was spent on dealing with complaints.

In comparison, a whopping $154,066 was spent to address complaints in the 2021/22 financial year.

While five complains were received for the previous financial year, two of them were found to not be in breach of the code of conduct, and therefore cost nothing to dismiss.

Meanwhile, a complaint made between April and June 2023 is yet to be finalised and so the final costs are yet to be determined.

That complaint is with an external conduct reviewer.

Deputy mayor Richard Ivey said it seemed the current group of councillors had been "fairly well immune" from complaints when compared to previous years.

"I take some heart from that," he said.

Council budgets $50,000 each year to deal with complaints.

The first point of contact when dealing with complaints about any of the council staff or the organisation itself is council's internal ombudsman.

The ombudsman position started in Dubbo in September 2017.

Council publishes its complaint statistics every quarter "for transparency both within council and in the boarder community".

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