Greater Sudbury releases interactive mock budget tool, lets people shift tax dollars around

Morning North6:53Online tool allows you to work on mock city budget for Sudbury

What would you do with $528 million? The city of Greater Sudbury has an online tool for you to tinker with it's 2017 budget. City councillor Mike Jakubo chairs the finance committee for Sudbury. He joined us in studio to talk about the new online tool.Think you can do a better job of managing Greater Sudbury's city budget?Now, you can try your hand at it.

This month, the city launched an online tool that allows people to tinker with a mock city budget, similar in some respects tothe one councillors have to work with.

CouncillorMike Jakubo,chair of the finance committee, saidpast years, citizens were simply invited to a budget meeting.

"What we tend to see in those meetings are a lot of one-off requests, more of an asking meeting," he said.

"What this tool requires everybody to do is actually balance that budget. So if you want something, you have to give something else up."

The web tool lets people shift money around in essential services like police and fire. It also allows people toallot dollars as they see fit to things like roads.

But, you can't eliminate any single item from the budget, and for example put everything into roads.

"No matter what ... residents may want us to do, as a city council and as a finance committee we do have responsibilities ...and things we have to make sure are running and operating for our citizens," said Jakubo.

Grater Sudbury's finance and administrationcommittees will ultimately seethe results of the mockbudget tinkering and they hope it will help topaint a picture of where citizen priorities lie.

"It's a way of really getting some really good and meaningful citizen input on this year's budget," said Jakubo.

Listen to the interview with Mike Jakubo