Rocky View County (RVC) is taking a different approach to garnering public input on its 2023 budget.

Residents and businesses are invited to use an online budget allocator tool to provide input into the 2023 county budget process.

With it, they can try their hand at balancing the budget while showing where they want the emphasis placed. They can increase, decrease, or maintain spending for services in several different categories.

The challenge is to do it all while staying within the county's tax revenue stream. Municipalities are not allowed to produce deficit budgets and if spending increases beyond anticipated revenue, so do property taxes.

In the county's 2022 citizens satisfaction survey, residents indicated they wanted more opportunities to provide input to the county. For feedback on the budget, it introduced this tool, powered by Balancing Act, a secure, online program designed to help communities participate in municipal budget planning  

“With this system, we feel we’ll get more input from a greater audience and that way anyone really interested in budgeting and where the dollars are being applied will have a bit of a say as far as providing that information to us for consideration,” says RVC Reeve Don Kochan.

It’s also an opportunity to get feedback on specific issues, he says.

“Perhaps they will also identify what services we are missing out on. Some areas don’t have garbage collection, there could be road maintenance issues, weed control issues that they want the county to be more aggressive on addressing.”

Public input is being accepted until Nov. 1. You can access the tool here.

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