Indigo Community Voice launched on Thursday, March 21, after claiming the council had lost the community's confidence.

Rutherglen's Herb Ellerbock has been appointed the group's inaugural president, while fellow Rutherglen residents Carol Gillman and Peter Twigg, long-time Indigo Shire ratepayer Christine Stewart and former Wodonga Council staffer Charlie Mitchell are part of the founding committee.

Indigo Council was formed in 1994 as an amalgamation of Rutherglen, Chiltern, Yackandandah and Beechworth shires, but Mr Ellerbock said the loss of faith in the council from ratepayers was evident with the annual Victorian Community Satisfaction performance surveys showing a consistent downward trend over the past five years.

The most recent survey result in August 2023 was an all-time low satisfaction rating of 50 per cent, driven by anger towards poor roads.

Mr Ellerbock said a key focus for Indigo Community Voice was council spending and "inadequate community consultation" that ultimately hit the pockets of ratepayers.

"We obviously want to look at the rating system and the manner in which rates are calculated and levied. We feel that there is a lack of fairness in the rating system that Indigo Shire uses," he said.

"It's not only Indigo Shire that uses this particular rating method, but it is something that produces very disproportionate rate increases for various segments of the community.

"Last year (2023), many of the rural farmers had phenomenally large rate increases. Even when the rate cap was only 3.5 per cent, many farmers on average had rate increases almost seven times that.

"The year before (2022), some residential ratepayers had rate increases more than eight times the rate cap.

"Things like the local government implementing rate caps back in 2015 was designed to minimise all these rate shocks, but that scheme hasn't worked at all."

Mr Ellerbock said residents were not being adequately consulted on various planning issues.

"We're going to be acting on those broader issues and we're going to try and create better communication between the community and council," he said.

"We don't think the consultation is broad enough. There's a demographic here that is not necessarily online, so a lot of people in the community are basically not being consulted and their views are not being heard, so we'd like to try and improve that.

"We've tried to reach as many of those community groups as possible to link everybody together into a united voice."

Mr Ellerbock said Indigo Community Voice had already started to reach out to residents to gauge their concerns.

"Once we sift through that and find out what the key issues are, we'll interrogate those key issues a little bit further," he said.

For more information on the group, visit indigocommunityvoice.org.