The City of Merritt is following up the “Thriving Communities” survey with yet another option for people to weigh in on their top priorities with the “2020 Citizen’s Budget”.

The adaptive survey allows you to tailor your ideal budget by entering your property value assessment and showing you a tax breakdown of exactly where each of your tax dollars are being spent. You then prepare a sample budget by allocating more or less funding to each.

You will be shown the total tax collected on your property, which includes school tax, hospital and regional district taxes, but the survey only allows you to specifically adjust the municipal portion of your tax bill.

Sheila Thiessen, City of Merritt’s Director of Finance, addressed mayor and council at Tuesday’s budget finalization meeting.

“The public engagement is a big part of our budget process. People don’t like to come to meetings, but we have engaged the services of a fellow to do a public engagement online. It has been put out on social media and on the website. So far, we’ve had about 29 people in on the site,” Thiessen explained.

The City hopes to use the data to adjust their 2021 budget based on what is most important to taxpayers. Results of the survey are available to everyone online and are adjusted in real time as more people take part.

Results so far indicate people would like to see a 2-percent increase to police services funding, a 1-percent increase in funding to public works and a 1-percent decrease in funding to recreation facilities, with funding to parks and recreation, transit and economic development ideally staying the same.

Overall, people have chosen road conditions as the most important issue, following closely behind is the issue of safer streets. Environmental initiatives and airport planning are considered less important issues.

“It’s pretty high-level input, so we can use it as we develop the 2021 budget. The public can go in and add comments on each of the items. We’ve focussed on six different departments,” said Thiessen.

The six areas of focus are RCMP, Public Works, Recreation Facilities, Parks and Recreation, Economic Development and Transit.

The survey will be available on the City of Merritt website until the end of March.