By CKPGToday

City Launches Citizen Budget

Oct 3, 2017 | 2:16 PM

It’s the time of year when the City’s number-crunchers want to get the discussion rolling around the upcoming budget. As part of the budget picture, it has launched the Citizen Budget.
“You go in and put your assessed value in your own home and we have the expenses of the City broken out into about a dozen categories,” explains Kris Dalio, the City’s Director of Finance. “It’ll show you where all your tax dollars are being allocated.”
For instance, if you went into the site and entered your property value at $300,000, scrolling further down the simulator would show that $588 of your tax bill goes to policing and another $399 goes toward paying for fire protection.
You can also use the slider to create your own budget; reducing the recreation bill from $132 to $119. Scroll further down and you will see that your slight reduction has saved you $13.2 per year.
You can submit your “preferred” budget and the City can use that, hypothetically, to gauge how taxpayers would like their hard-earned money spent.