Bendigo Residents Speak Up: 'We Can't Keep Waiting' on Water and Waste

Community members across Bendigo say they are watching water levels fall, green waste pile up uncollected, and council commitments stall, and they want answers before another dry summer strips the region bare. The City of Greater Bendigo's own environmental strategy, adopted in 2022, set a target of net-zero council operations by 2030, but residents in several suburbs say they have seen little visible progress on the ground in 2026.

The frustration is not just local noise. Across regional Victoria, communities that depend on river systems and agricultural land are under mounting pressure from consecutive below-average rainfall years. For Bendigo, which sits in the upper reaches of the Loddon catchment, that pressure is acute. The Bureau of Meteorology recorded 2025 as the third-driest year in Central Victoria since 1950, and the 2026 winter has offered only marginal relief, with Bendigo receiving roughly 60 per cent of its July average rainfall through the month's first two days.

Voices from the Suburbs and the Riverbank

In Kangaroo Flat, residents near the Specimen Gully Road corridor say a planned community garden and water-harvesting project flagged by the council's Greening Bendigo program has sat unstarted since a sod-turning event in October 2024. Local members of the Loddon Campaspe Landcare Network, which operates across more than 40 groups in the region, say they have been pressing Coliban Water and the council for coordinated funding since late last year without a clear timeline. One Landcare volunteer, who attends monthly working bees at Crusoe Reservoir parklands, said members are spending their own money buying native tubestock at roughly $3.50 a plant because grant cycles at the state level are running six to eight months behind schedule.

At White Hills, a neighbourhood that flooded in 2022 and again in 2023, households are asking why a stormwater drainage upgrade promised under the council's 2023-24 capital works budget has not been completed. The City of Greater Bendigo confirmed in May that the Rowan Street drainage project, valued at $1.4 million, had been deferred to the 2026-27 financial year due to contractor availability. For residents who spent thousands on flood repairs, that deferral is not an abstraction.

The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, the Traditional Owner body for the Bendigo region, has also raised concerns about the pace of cultural heritage assessments tied to two proposed solar farm developments on the city's northern fringe near Raywood Road. The corporation has statutory consultation rights under Victoria's Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006, and community members say the assessment process is being compressed by developer timelines that do not account for Country obligations, specifically the need to survey sites after rainfall opens the soil and makes scarred trees and artefacts visible.

What the Data Shows, and What Comes Next

Coliban Water's most recent annual report showed the region's major storage, Lake Eppalock, sitting at 28 per cent capacity as of June 2026, down from 41 per cent at the same point in 2025. The utility has stage two water restrictions in place across Bendigo, Castlemaine, and Kyneton, limiting outdoor watering to two days per week before 10am or after 6pm. Permanent water saving rules remain in force regardless of restriction stage.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus has been running a small-scale greywater recycling pilot in its Building E precinct on Edwards Road since February, and researchers there expect to publish preliminary findings by September. The project is partly funded through a $280,000 grant from the Victorian Government's Sustainability Fund, and campus sustainability staff say community groups have already made informal approaches about replicating the model at scale.

The City of Greater Bendigo is due to table its revised Environment and Sustainability Action Plan at the August council meeting, the first formal update since 2023. Community members wanting to contribute feedback can register through the council's Participate Bendigo portal before July 25. For those already connected to Landcare or the Dja Dja Wurrung Corporation's public engagement forums, the next scheduled information session is set for July 17 at the Ulumbarra Theatre on View Street.