Over 750 pages from
20 individual budget
documents
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Participatory budgeting
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Budget cuts
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People don’t have time
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Council genuinely wants to listen to
people’s views
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Shah Amin
Senior Communication Officer Web/Digital
Demo
http://letstalkbudget.dev.indigo.ws/
380 budgets submitted
159 people gave up
115 surveys completed
Firstly I want to say this is a fantastic web page and anyone who takes issues
with council budgetary decisions should have to take part in this. I feel this is a
balance that could be achieved with the least impact across the board.
Protecting and nurturing the future. i.e. our children should be protected as this
is the will have long term benefits.
A stronger emphasis on recycling could offset the reduction in the budget. I kept 'Maintaining neighbourhoods' and 'Enforcement and regulation' as this will hopefully offset the
initial negative effects of that budget being lowered. The council tax argument is in principal simple, if you want the services, someone has to pay for them (and any vocal parties
should use this budget to demonstrate how they'd do it). The reductions to Culture, leisure and libraries would hopefully be offset by a larger social media driven community
engagement. It is not ideal but none of these reductions are. Finally 'Central and support services', hopefully the advances in IT would offset the high capital costs 'state of the art'
infrastructure. I've worked with national government and SME to large business and the ability to integrate services while maintaining growth has been amazing. I can only hope a
well managed modernisation could maintain the status-quo while reducing costs.
This is a clever tool firstly - I have been talking about it with my
students as it is a good example of building relationships with people,
and engaging people in the decision making, in addition to providing an
overview of the serious challenge you face.
It clearly demonstrates the challenges you face - and I wholly disagree with current national government policy which is aiming to dismantle local government - and move to an
outsourced leaner model. However I feel that projects to build large transport junctions in Newcastle (e.g. blue house roundabout etc) are short sighted and costly. Instead we should be
working on taking people out of their cars, using public transport more intensively (through reduced fares, through saving money on road repairs/transport infrastructure) and asking
those who choose to drive into our city in their cars to pay for the privilege. Making public transport free for those under 18 and attending school is a good start - and much of the
congestion I see at peak times is caused by parents driving their children to school (particularly the private schools in Jesmond) - by charging cars/lorries for clogging up our streets
(perhaps within a 3 mile radius of the centre of Newcastle) you would reduce traffic road use, cut down on potholes, and make some income - it is not an impossibility.
Adopting a 'green' approach to doing things, might help improve our environment, and have knock on effects for the local population (getting people fitter). I know you face an
impossible task - you didn't create this situation - and are responding to a national ideological drive towards reducing local government. The best you can do, is engage with the local
population.
It's the least impact I could manage, protecting the most vulnerable as far as
possible but also trying to safeguard income streams when "saving" money
somewhere might actually cost money somewhere else.
50,000 visits to website
Facebook reach 300,000
Twitter impressions 116,000
Improvements for next year’s budget
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The more simple you can make things, the better the engagement
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Thank you for listening