Mildura Rural City Council & Mildura Sporting Precinct

This is the second chapter of Mildura’s OPTIMOGOV story. The first, published in 2024, captured the original transformation — Mildura moving from a largely manual, fragmented booking process to a configured, online-first venue management system, with Diary & Corporate Booking, the Public Casual and Regular Booking Portals, the BPoint payment gateway, Civica Authority finance integration, HPCM9 document repository integration, and Azure Active Directory single sign-on. That foundation is what made everything that follows possible. For the original story, read the 2024 case study: Mildura Optimises Online Venue Bookings with OPTIMOGOV.

What follows is where Mildura is now. Five years in. Two go-lives. Two distinct operations. 369 bookable spaces. 8,200+ bookings. One platform, still doing more every quarter.

When most people think of a council’s facilities management challenge, they imagine a single type of operation — a booking system for parks, or a sports centre, or a community hall. Mildura is different, and that’s exactly the point. OPTIMOGOV simultaneously runs two completely different operations for Mildura Rural City Council on a single platform: the council’s entire public venue and facilities portfolio across 43 venues (parks, halls, ovals, heritage homesteads, arts precincts, event spaces), and Mildura Sporting Precinct, one of the region’s busiest indoor sporting facilities (multi-court stadium, AFL ovals, function rooms, squash courts).

Different teams. Different workflows. Different customer bases. Different pricing models. Different integrations. One platform handling all of it, in parallel, without compromise. That is what OPTIMOGOV was built to do, and Mildura is the proof.

Mildura Rural City Council’s facility portfolio spans the full range of what a large regional council manages. OPTIMOGOV handles it all without requiring separate systems for separate use cases.

Mildura Sporting Precinct is a high-volume, counter-driven operation where bookings are processed in real time, recurring club arrangements run alongside casual court hires, and the mix of activity types spans competitive sport, community events, and private functions. OPTIMOGOV has been the system of record since day one.

Together, MRCC and MSP represent the breadth of what OPTIMOGOV is built for. Not just a hall booking system. Not just a sports centre tool. A single platform that handles the full complexity of public facility management: a heritage rose garden hired for a wedding ceremony, a championship-grade indoor sports court running a regional badminton tournament, an outdoor arts event at Nowingi Place, a recurring junior basketball season at Court 4, a council-internal staff booking, a casual squash court hire on a Tuesday night, a community group’s seasonal rollover, and a one-off corporate function in the function room overlooking the show court.

Every one of these runs through the same platform, with the right pricing, the right approvals, the right documents, the right payment flow, and the right reporting attached — configured once and reused across both operations.

The reason OPTIMOGOV works for both MRCC and MSP — two very different operations — is that it was designed from the ground up for the complexity of public sector facility management. There is no commercial booking platform that natively handles AFL oval hire, badminton court casual bookings, multi-tier council pricing, license agreements, internal staff bookings, seasonal sports allocations, recurring club rollovers, online payments, finance system reconciliation, single sign-on for staff, and heritage precinct events within a single system. OPTIMOGOV does, and Mildura has been running it that way, in production, every day, for nearly five years.