Residents interested in how their tax dollars are spent have a new tool to provide feedback to the city.
Last week, the city launched Citizen Budget, an online budget simulator that lets people play with allocations of various city functions.
Developed by Quebec-based Open North, Citizen Budget (available at princegeorge.citizenbudget.com) users can see how their individual property tax contributions are divided among budget areas such as police services, roads and parks.
They can increase, decrease or maintain service levels in each area and immediately see what impact it has on their monthly tax payments.
The results will be collected over the next month as part of the 2016 budget consultation process.
During Monday night's meeting, city council was presented with the results of two surveys conducted over the summer to gauge public opinion on the budget and city's customer service function.
The budget survey, conducted by Mustel Group over the phone between July 13 and July 25, again put fixing the roads at the top of respondents' list of concerns.
Results also suggest that when it comes to taxes and service levels, residents equally (28 per cent) prefer having no tax increase with potential cuts to services or having an increase of two or three per cent with no cuts to services. A tax increase of less than two per cent with potential cuts to services was the preferred option for 21 per cent of respondents, while 17 per cent preferred having a greater than three per cent increase to taxes to fund improvements to service levels.
City staff and council members will continue to solicit resident feedback next month - dubbed Talktober - with a series of neighbourhood meetings.
The schedule for the meetings is as follows:
Oct. 1: East Bowl, at the South Fort George Family Resource Centre
Oct. 7: Blackburn, at Blackburn Community Hall
Oct. 14: Vanway/Beaverly/Haldi, at Vanway elementary school
Oct. 21: College Heights, at Columbus Community Hall
Oct. 28: West Bowl, at the Kinsmen Hall
The two-hour sessions begin at 6:30 p.m. and conclude with a question-and-answer period for the mayor and members of city council.
