The Central Coast Council's Water and Sewer directorate are working with the community to improve water and sewer services, by understanding what matters most to residents and businesses, now and into the future.
Since 2021, Council has engaged with the community to gather feedback on customer priorities, expectations and experiences. This feedback has informed Council’s current submission to the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) and supported the development of a set of community‑driven values and outcomes for water and sewer services.
From 2023 onwards, residents and businesses have continued to share what they value most about these services, including how they prefer to receive updates on Council’s performance, planned and unplanned outages, and the delivery of important information.
As part of Council’s current Water and Sewer Delivery Plan 2022-2026, Council will seek to engage with its customers to retest whether the values identified by the community in 2023, 2024 and 2025 remain relevant in 2026, or whether priorities have changed and what that means in practice.
Next Steps
The delivery of Central Coast Council’s water and sewer services is a shared responsibility between Council and its customers.
Central Coast Council will use the feedback from this survey to check whether the community values identified in recent years still reflect what matters most today. This will help guide future planning, investment and service delivery for water and sewer services that align with community priorities as Council heads into the next IPART determination period.
A comprehensive program will be taking place across multiple channels before the end of the 2025-26 financial year, which will include seeking community feedback on:
- Values and outcomes
- Identify how customers want to receive information and updates, including
- How Water and Sewer should send notifications and alerts for planned and unplanned outages
- How important information, education, project updates and future engagement opportunities should be shared
Previous Engagement
2024
The Central Coast Council Water and Sewer department, along with engagement consultant, Captivate Consulting delivered an ambitious consultation program aimed to help us gain valuable customer insights and preferences to inform our upcoming pricing proposal. This proposal to IPART (Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal) will guide the prices that Council charges for water and sewer services.
Under IPART’s new framework, the pricing proposal must involve our customers in setting the service priorities and outcomes that matter most to them. The proposal must also promote our customers’ values and demonstrate that we understand our customers' preferences.
As a result, we designed and implemented an extensive engagement plan aimed at reaching a diverse range of customers and community members across the Central Coast LGA.
For more information, view the engagement summary or full engagement outcomes report.
2023
Central Coast Council worked with the community to collect feedback that will help improve Council’s water and sewer services.
Residents and businesses shared with Council what they value most about their water and sewer services.
Feedback collected also included how customers would like to receive updates on Council’s progress in delivering on those values - defining Council’s water and sewer future performance reporting metrics.
This work continued Council’s collaboration with the community that began in 2021, underpinning the previous submission to the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART)
Two targeted community engagement forums were delivered in Gosford and Wyong in March and May. This was followed by a community wide survey which closed 3 July 2023.
The research informed a new Water and Sewer Customer Charter outlining the responsibilities between Central Coast Council and our customers. The findings in this research were also key to our Performance Report and Delivery Plan.
