Municipal officials seem pleased with a move to virtual information sessions for this year’s budget process.
Three Facebook live sessions were held last week to gather public input, and Mayor Darrin Canniff says they had a good amount of engagement from local residents.
“The process this year has certainly been a tough one, given that we can’t be in person. But we’ve been working really hard to make sure that it’s as accessible as possible,” Canniff says. “It’s an experiment, we’re viewing what’s happened and see what we can do to improve upon it.”
While each video presentation has logged over a thousand views, municipal officials say the averaged about 75-80 people that watched the sessions live. That’s a big improvement over the number of people who would normally come out for the traditional in-person meetings in years’ past.
CAO Don Shropshire says the input has given them a better understanding of how area residents have been impacted by COVID-19.
“Depending on how hard people have been with COVID, the nature of the questions or the concerns are very different,” Shropshire says. “We’ve had some people that have been hit really hard economically, so you can imagine they are very concerned about tax increases and they’re looking at where they can get additional support, either from our local government or in many cases from our senior levels of government.”
Council will begin budget deliberations on Wednesday, trying to chip away at a proposed 3.96% tax hike.