Public input on this year's municipal budget in Chatham-Kent is at an all-time high.
The municipality partnered with Open North to create the Citizen Budget in November 2016, which allowed residents to create their own municipal budget for 2017, in order to have a better understanding of how the budgetary process works.
"The most important part of the Citizen Budget was to provided people with a lot of detailed information about how much the services that are provided to the citizens costs," says Gord Quinton, Chatham-Kent's director of budget and performance services.
However, he some of that feedback was also taken into account heading into the draft budget meeting on January 11.
"It certainly gave us trends," he says. There seems to be a lot of support for the infrastructure services for example. [There were] a lot of comments saying, 'We need investment in roads or snowplowing.'"
Results of the survey show that 753 people visited the online tool and 223 people left comments.
Quinton says in the upcoming weeks the Citizen Budget will be discussed in council to determine whether the municipality will continue using it in the future or whether this will be a one-time project.