Residents Balancing Municipal Budgets Online

In preparation for its 2022 municipal budget, the City of Beaumont offered residents an innovative and technology-enabled way to have their say using an online budget simulation tool.

The tool put residents in the chairs of its City Council and asked the question: “how would you allocate municipal dollars while maintaining a balanced budget?”

Using the tool, residents were able to indicate their values and priorities while simultaneously seeing the impacts of their decisions.

This exercise increased residents’ awareness of the implications that operating dollars have on their community’s tax rate. It also highlighted the legislation to which a budget must correspond – notably, municipalities cannot run a deficit so an increase in funding means reducing spending somewhere else in their budgets, and / or increasing revenue via taxes or fees.

The tool was offered to the public until September 21, 2022. As residents tend to have differing views on how and where municipal dollars should be spent, the results of the tool are intended to help the City of Beaumont better identify budgetary priorities as it heads into its 2022 budget process starting this fall.

For more information, please contact please contact dblackburn [at] auma.ca (Dan Blackburn), Senior Director of Growth & Innovation.