New and enhanced services funded by SRV
Current Initiatives
We’re committed to creating cleaner, safer and more welcoming town centres for our community. Based on feedback and priorities identified through engagement programs, we’ve allocated funding to improve services and deliver a range of key initiatives:
Pavement cleaning
Community feedback ranked footpath washing as a top priority. In response, we’ve expanded our pavement cleaning service by 59%, now covering over 41,000 square metres across 31 town centres. High-traffic town centres areas such as Campsie, Greenacre, Lakemba and Punchbowl now receive monthly pavement washes, up from two to six times per year. This ensures cleaner, more inviting spaces for everyone.
Multi-level carpark cleaning
We’ve introduced an annual deep clean of all paved areas in the seven council-owned multi-level carparks, to improve the appearance of these important community assets. This includes pressure washing stairwells, parking bays, walls and other hard-to-reach areas, removing built-up grime and creating a more pleasant environment for residents and visitors.
General cleaning
We’ve invested in advanced cleaning technology to make our cleaning services more efficient and effective. Our new outdoor electric litter vacuum not only picks up litter but also uses water jets for deep cleaning. This equipment reduces manual handling, improves safety and allows us to clean street furniture and remove stains quickly, keeping our town centres looking their best.
Street bin replacements
To make litter disposal easier and improve the overall appearance of our town centres, we’ve introduced an annual program to replace older street bins with a modern, standard design. These new bins are more user-friendly and help reduce litter. Each year, we aim to replace a set number of bins to ensure consistency and convenience across our town centres.
Street bin collections
We’re improving the way we manage street bin collections by introducing a digital scheduling tool. This system allows staff to log collection times and locations in real time, giving us better visibility and accurate data for future planning. It also integrates with our asset management system to keep information up to date and ensure efficient operations. This upgrade means smarter and more efficient service delivery.
Reviewing cleaning service standards
We’ve completed a thorough review of our cleaning service standards, processes, staffing levels and equipment. From this review, we’ve identified improvements that will make our town centres cleaner and more welcoming. We’re now actively implementing more changes to deliver better outcomes for the community.
We’re dedicated to improving the cleanliness of our streets and have allocated funding to two key services to address the needs of our community.
Programmed street tree maintenance
We’re improving street tree maintenance with a new scheduled under-pruning program, designed to keep our streets clean and tidy. The program includes:
- Mapping all Council street trees
- Developing a Tree Works Prioritization Framework to guide our efforts
- Clearing the backlog of maintenance requests
- Creating a regular tree maintenance schedule
- Launching the program according to the framework and schedule
This initiative is part of our ongoing commitment to creating a great city we love, where our community enjoys well-maintained, beautiful streets.
Programmed drainage and pit cleaning
We’re rolling out a new programmed cleaning scheduled for the 30,000 drains across our city to help keep our streets and waterways cleaner. This initiative is designed to enhance the overall cleanliness of our city whilst also preventing blockages and reduce flooding risks.
City Presentation Program
Our dedicated Place Management Team plays a vital role in improving the look and feel of our town centres and open spaces. Their priority is ensuring these spaces are clean, safe and well maintained for everyone to enjoy.
The team focuses on coordinating services and teams to lift standards, improve operational efficiency and align services to achieve improvements for the community.
By coordinating efforts and addressing gaps, small and important improvement are made that keep our town centres clean and tidy.
Here’s a snapshot of where we're focusing our efforts right now:
Neighbourhood centres
We’re focusing on neighbourhood centres, which are smaller centres with five to ten businesses such as takeaway shops, cafes, chemists, hairdressers and convenience stores. These centres are essential to local communities, and the team is working to improve cleaning and maintenance standards. This includes coordinating small and important maintenance fixes and general upkeep from improving cleanliness of pavements and street furniture, ensuring bin collection and weed maintenance services are adequate and tackling illegal dumping and graffiti to create a tidier and more inviting environment.
Street furniture care
Street furniture is a key part of the town centre experience, and the team is committed to improving its upkeep. We’re focusing on a proactive painting program for timber seats, proactive deep cleaning of seats and shade structures and continued focus on coordinating timely responses for general upkeep.
Street tree and garden care
We’re working to align services to ensure timely and safe tree pruning and replacements, maintaining garden beds, including the removal of litter from garden beds. These improvements help create greener, cleaner and more attractive public spaces.
General cleanliness
Maintaining overall cleanliness is a major focus. The team coordinates compliance services to address illegal dumping, business waste in street bins and commercial bins left in public areas. They are working to prevent issues such as overflowing bins, scattered litter and bird feeding, while ensuring quick responses to cleanliness concerns that fall outside standard cleaning schedules.
Raised pedestrian grate cleaning
We’re improving how raised pedestrian grates are cleaned and maintained by aligning day-to-day and deep cleaning services and introducing a suction vehicle for more effective results. This ensures these high-use areas remain safe and clean.
Public toilet review
Public toilets are under review, with a focus on opening hours and cleaning standards to better align with community needs. This work aims to improve convenience and hygiene for everyone.
Proactive business engagement program
The Place Management Team is leading a proactive business engagement program to build strong, collaborative relationships with local businesses. This program ensures businesses feel heard, supported and informed by Council, while empowering them to contribute to maintaining clean and tidy local centres. Through regular conversations and feedback, the team promotes shared responsibility and captures community sentiment on recent service and place improvements.
Place-based community engagement programs
We’re actively partnering with local businesses and community members to gain a deeper understanding of their needs and priorities with the goal of improving the look and feel of our town centres and open spaces.
We’re committed to working closely with local businesses and community members to better understand their needs and priorities.
Town centre engagement programs
To ensure local voices are heard, we’ve introduced a mix of formal and informal engagement initiatives:
- 2023: We connected with 1,200 local business workers and 550 community members through surveys and face-to-face sessions. Their feedback provided valuable insights that are shaping our service improvements.
- 2024: We expanded our formal program to include businesses across 27 neighbourhood centres, engaging face-to-face with over 200 participants.
This feedback identified key priorities for improvement, which we are now addressing.
Top three improvements identified in 2024:
1. Improve overall cleanliness
2. Enhance the cleanliness of pavements
3. Improve cleaning of street furniture
• 2025: We launched an informal proactive business engagement program to build strong, collaborative relationships with local businesses. This program ensures businesses feel heard, supported and informed by Council, while encouraging shared responsibility for maintaining clean and tidy centres. Through regular conversations and feedback, we capture community sentiment and promote continuous improvement.
Open space engagement programs
In 2025, we introduced formal engagement initiatives to connect with park users and understand their priorities for maintaining local parks. This feedback helps us focus on what matters most, keeping parks clean, tidy and enjoyable all year round.
Tracking progress for better community experience
We're committed to focusing on what matters most to our community. That's why we're actively tracking our progress through our community engagement initiatives designed to measure satisfaction and guide improvements.
By listening to feedback from local businesses and community members, we can better understand where to make the biggest impact.
Community Place Score – town centres
In 2023, we introduced a Place Score, a community-informed metric that helps us measure the satisfaction with cleanliness and maintenance of public places across our town centres. This helps us understand where we should focus our improvements, to meet your needs and expectations.
This score is based entirely on community feedback and reflects how well each town centre meets local expectations.
Each town centres receives a score out of 5, with 5 being the highest.
In 2023, the average Community Place Score across our 31 key town centres was 2.71 out of 5. This baseline provided us a clear starting point to track improvements over time.
In 2024, we set a target of 3 out of 5 and we achieved it! While not every town centre reached the goal, this progress has helped us identify where more targeted improvements are needed in 2025 and 2026.
This feedback allows us to understand how people experience our public spaces and guides future service enhancements.
The next Community Place Score will be collected in 2026-27. Your feedback will continue to shape how we care for our town centres.
View the results in the interactive dashboard below.
Community Place Score – local parks
In 2025-26, we are focused on a developing a Place Score for local parks. This is also a community-informed metric that helps us measure the satisfaction with cleanliness and general upkeep of natural areas and infrastructure in our smaller local parks.
Feedback from the community will be collected via different surveys and the results will inform the baseline Community Place Score for parks. This will guide how we maintain and improve our parks in the future.
Explore the Data
Use the interactive dashboard below to see how each town centre is performing.
Enhancing services to improve parks
We’re committed to creating cleaner, safer and more welcoming local parks for our community. Here are a few things we are focused on key service improvements.
Reviewing bin collection and cleaning service standards.
We are conducting a review of park cleaning services with a focus on bin collections and litter removal. This review will help us identify opportunities to improve how we maintain our parks, ensuring they remain clean and enjoyable for everyone.
Reviewing public toilet cleaning and operational hours.
We are also reviewing public toilet facilities in parks, focusing on cleaning standards opening hours. This assessment will help us to better understand gaps and community needs guiding improvements that enhance convenience and hygiene for everyone.