Window For Public Input On City Budget Closing
Prince George, BC – The opportunity to provide input for the 2013 City budget deliberations is drawing to a close, but almost 300 did take part in a first-ever online survey.
The City’s Manager of Communications and Citizen Engagement, Chris Bone, says 270 individuals have responded to the survey querying their satisfaction level with city services and how they’d like to see municipal tax dollars distributed. Bone says access to the survey will remain on the city’s website (www.princegeorge.ca) until the public session closes at this evening’s meeting at 6:15pm.
Based on responses, the top five areas of importance were: fire protection, library services, garbage collection, sewer systems, and police protection.
Bone points out the rankings are comparable to past surveys conducted by UNBC’s Institute for Social Research and Evaluation, the last one being in 2011 when 700 city residents responded to the mail-in survey. She says the two biggest changes in the top ten are police protection, which was ranked 9th in 2011 and now ranks 5th, and park maintenance, which dropped from the 6th greatest concern in 2011, to 13th now.
"Certainly, this is a snapshot of public opinion at a very specific point in time," says the City’s Manager of Communications. She cautions it’s not statistically accurate, but says it does provide another piece of information as Councillors go through budget deliberations.
Comments
My input:
STOP SPENDING MONEY YOU DON’T HAVE!
KEEP
IT
SIMPLE
SILLY
They don’t listen to the publics opinion anyway, waste of time. As a matter of fact, what form of government does? Please enlighten me.
Governments do not read petitions nor do they kowtow to mobs. Even hundreds of people. Why should govts. listen? These ninnies didn’t vote for them. I sure wouldn’t want my country dictated to surly deadbeat ne’er do well mobs with the cause of the day or petitions. Used to be “thank you for your vote, see you in four years. Five years if we are unpopular”. You want Idle no more or the Occupy movement or Greenpeace or Quebec students running our country? A most interesting country, eh wot?
“how they’d like to see municipal tax dollars distributed”
There is a false assumption there that more money=improved service.
That may be true or may not be true.
Money is not the only factor. Better management would be an additional factor as would be improved priority setting just to name a couple.
The question should be, which program is the least effective and requires the greatest effort to improve.
A dollar earned is a dollar taxed— not like the rich get a free ride on Canadians back—get rid of the HST and Harper.
Police protection? Hmmmm Seems to me they show up after a crime because 99 % of the time there is no way they could know in advance. The other things they do (traffic fines) are not protection. Bustng a grow op is not protection. The cell phone tickets issued last year in BC brought 38 million into the coffers according to the number of fines and the amounts published in the Citizen. It’s not about the money, it’s about safety right?? I’m betting very few of those fines were handed out due to an accident.
Such is life in the “best place in earth”.
@ traveller … The police are there to protect themselves and the politicians who set their salaries. Pretty much they are just armed government revenue enhancers through ticket-writing.
I have lived at my current address for almost 6 years. We have NEVER ONCE seen a cop drive through this neighbourhood, and we are at home almost all the time.
I had a large outboard motor (90 HP) stolen off a boat parked in our back yard awhile back. The cops response? “We will give you a case number so you can phone your insurance company to put in a claim.”
I think they just solved the budget problem today — I counted about 15 cars ticketed on 10th ave and Laurier Crescent in front of the Phoenix Medical Bldg at 11am this morning. The tickets noted a violation of “winter regulations” — there was no snow to remove on 10th ave so seemed unethical to me. Thought I was in some southern US state.
Busting a crack house? Takes paper work, warrants, planning, team work, meetings, risky take downs (with more than one cop), and resulting in more paper work for each of them, then waiting for the judge to release them on their own recogizance, trial a few months later, sentenced to one day in jail and eighteen months probation. Ergo no money for the provincial and municipal coffers.
Re: traffic fines and such related matters. Biggest risk would be constables taking time off work due to writers cramp issuing those tickets with your reciept available to you in advance.
We can make this difficult or we make it easy. Here’s yer ticket. Have a nice day.
jetstream: “I have lived at my current address for almost 6 years. We have NEVER ONCE seen a cop drive through this neighbourhood, and we are at home almost all the time.”
Do you spend all day looking out the window?
jetstream: “I had a large outboard motor (90 HP) stolen off a boat parked in our back yard awhile back. The cops response? “We will give you a case number so you can phone your insurance company to put in a claim.”
This is not unusual for small crimes. Did you expect a full forensic CSI team like on TV? K-9 units?
I had my car broken into several years ago and my cheap stereo stolen. I got the same response. When you consider how many times this happens in a day, we would need 10x as many police to investigate these kinds of crimes to your satisfaction. And they still would never catch who did it.
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