Have you ever heard your local mayor utter these words? If you haven't, do you wish you had?

If your answer to the second question is "yes", perhaps you need to relocate to the rolling hills of South Gippsland.

Because in a very unique move, the South Gippsland Shire Council has backed a new plan where local residents would determine how $1.6 million from the council budget is spent.

Local councillors have endorsed a plan where four local towns would each receive $400,000 next financial year to spend on capital works projects. Residents in each of those towns – Korumburra, Foster, Venus Bay and Mirboo North – would form a special budget "jury" determining precisely how and where their town's $400,000 is spent.

Councillors endorsed the budgeting proposal at their August meeting, and asked council officers to produce a report on the suitability of the system and how it could work. The "participatory budgeting jury" system is not yet formal policy, but councillors and the shire chief executive Tim Tamlin like the idea.

Mr Tamlin said the three main drivers behind the council's push for the proposed budgeting system were; to build better community engagement and ensure councillors were better "community stewards", address poor community satisfaction ratings with the council, and because of the council's constrained financial circumstances.

Cr Mohya Davies said the most important reason for adopting the strategy was to improve community engagement. The budgeting juries would give people "an opportunity to have a real say in how the town is going to develop, what's going to happen and how things might look in the future", she said.

"It's a significant percentage of our budget, absolutely, and it will certainly have an influence on those communities and how things will be directed," she said.

Rob Buchan, proprietor of Modern Male Menswear in Korumburra and a resident of ​Leongatha North, welcomed the proposal and said he would be interested in joining a budgeting jury.

"It's a fantastic concept," he said, predicting a strong response from residents.

"They'll have heaps of ideas, there'll be people putting their hands up for lots of different things … Korumburra generally has a good response to stuff like this, it is a very community-focused town," he said.

While he spoke to The Saturday Age, residents hurried along the bumpy footpath outside his shop, rushing to avoid a heavy shower of rain.

He nominated fixing and making safe the uneven footpath in the town's steep main street, which he said was deteriorating and very challenging for elderly residents, as his "No. 1" project for Korumburra's allocation.

"I've seen people go flat on their face out there," he said.

Mr Buchan, who pays rates on two properties in the shire, said the budgeting idea would improve engagement between the council and residents.

But in the neighbouring business, Korumburra Photographics, Dave Smith said the shire's proposal for budgeting juries did not sound like a good idea. "It would probably be better if the council themselves decided where to spend the money, maybe after consultation with the locals. I can't really see the benefit of having a local panel decide where to spend the money," he said.

"I would rather skilled people, and we assume that the council are skilled, that they work to allocating it," he said.

Deputy Mayor Nigel Hutchinson-Brooks said: "We see this very much as a toe-in-the-water exercise, the first step on a journey which will go over several councils. And we will get more and more sophisticated at doing the participatory budgeting."

Cr Hutchinson-Brooks said the budgeting juries in each of the four towns could include about six to 12 people.

Bill McArthur, president of the Municipal Association of Victoria, welcomed the council move. Asked if it was a good idea, he said: "Yes, absolutely. The stronger engagement we have with the communities, the better off everyone is."