invitation

You and your fellow neighbors are invited to a follow-up city budget meeting Saturday, Nov. 5 from 9 to 11:15 a.m. at the SE Community Center. At an Oct. 1 meeting at Bartle Hall, neighborhoods asked City Councilperson and Budget Committee Chair Jan Marcason for a chance to give face-to-face input on budget priorities. This meeting will allow participants input into budget priorities before the budget is finalized. The meeting has been planned by neighborhood representatives who were at the Oct. 1 meeting at Bartle Hall.
 * Invitation to Neighborhood City Budget Meeting**
 * The goal of this meeting is to allow neighborhoods to discuss their priorities on six key areas of the budget. ** We will divide into small groups to discuss the following “buckets of money” for the budget and identify what specific activities, programs or services are most important to neighborhoods.
 * ** Public safety ** : including police; fire; emergency medical treatment; disaster planning; crime and the courts.
 * ** Economic growth: ** including investment in the urban core; business practices at city hall; planning, building and zoning code regulations; public transportation; tourism; business attraction, retention and development; and economic development tools.
 * ** Public infrastructure: ** including streets; curbs; sidewalks; stormwater catch basins; bridges; water systems and public buildings.
 * ** Healthy Community: ** including youth services; social services; sanitary sewer systems; recreation services; recycling; trash collection and disposal; walkable communities and health and wellness services.
 * ** Neighborhood Livability: ** including development, rehabilitation and financing of housing; code enforcement – property maintenance, enforcement, and solid waste; park maintenance and development; clean city; land use planning; streetlighting and street tree maintenance.
 * ** Governance ** : including city agencies; communication with citizens; customer service and the mayor’s office, city council, city manager
 * The process at the meeting: ** At the Nov. 5 meeting, each participant will be able to meet in **//two small groups//** to discuss the budget areas listed above and vote on priorities**//. If a neighborhood wants to have input into all six budget areas, the neighborhood should send three representatives and have each of them attend two different small group discussions.//** After the two rounds of small group discussions, the entire group will come together to hear the priorities identified by other groups. Then each individual will have an opportunity to vote on the budget priorities that are most important to them.
 * How the results will be used: ** The city council gathers input from a variety of sources, including its own priorities, input from city departments and online comments. The results of this meeting will give the council a sense of the consensus from neighborhoods in terms of their top priorities for the coming budget. Council members will be invited to attend the meeting and hear the discussions, and they will be provided with a report on the priorities as identified at the meeting.