The City of Melbourne adopted its 2026-27 budget on Tuesday evening, ratifying a package that puts $73.2 million toward cleaning and safety across the central city, $26.4 million into the Garden City greening programme, and $41.2 million into events, arts and cultural activation. Lord mayor Nick Reece presented the budget to the Future Melbourne Committee as a deliberately “back-to-basics” package focused on the visible state of the central business district.
The cleaning and safety allocation is the largest single line in the discretionary budget and reflects months of community consultation that ranked rubbish, graffiti and aggressive begging as the issues residents and visitors said most affected their experience of the city. The package funds an expanded street-cleaning roster, additional graffiti removal contracts, and a third year of additional council-licensed safety officers along Bourke and Swanston Streets.
The Garden City line preserves a programme launched at the start of Reece’s tenure that aims to plant 200,000 trees and shrubs across the municipality by 2028. About 110,000 had been planted by the end of 2025, the council said, with the bulk of the remaining plantings concentrated in Docklands, Carlton and the Hoddle Grid.
Tuesday’s vote also confirmed continued funding for Make Room, the council’s 50-apartment supportive-housing project for people sleeping rough, which is now fully tenanted and managed in partnership with Unison. A further $4.1 million was approved for outreach services through the Melbourne City Mission, with a specific focus on Little India and the southern end of Elizabeth Street.
Several substantive consultation themes did not translate into specific budget lines. Homelessness services received a modest uplift but no headline expansion; transport spending tracked broadly flat in real terms; and proposed council action on substance use was deferred pending a state-government review now due in August.
Councillor Davydd Griffiths, who chaired the budget-development working group, said the package reflected “the limits of what local government can do alone” and called for the Victorian state government to expand its co-funding role on housing and mental health. State treasurer Tim Pallas, in a brief response, said the state would “engage constructively” but offered no new commitments.
Rates for 2026-27 will rise by 2.85 percent, the maximum allowed under Victoria’s rate cap, with average residential rates climbing by roughly $74 a year. Business rate increases are higher in absolute terms but lower as a percentage of bill totals because of the timing of the council’s 2024 valuation cycle.