2021-04-23 Special Meeting Agenda

SPECIAL MEETING AGENDA                                                                23 APRIL 2021


A summary of the key outcomes has been provided below.

1     Balance Your Noosa Council Operating Budget Participation Tool




The balance the budget online participation tool was deployed on the Your Say Noosa webpage in
an attempt to engage and educate the community regarding Council’s budget, and allow a resident
and or ratepayer to sit in a Councillor’s shoes regarding setting spending priorities, in addition to
ensuring that the budget is balanced by either increasing revenues or reducing spending in other
areas. Feedback from the use of the tool by the community is intended to assist Councillors in
understanding whether the spending priorities of the community aligns with Council’s current and
future spending priorities, with any significant funding misalignment explored and understood as part
of the budget process.

The tool was made available for use from 1 March to 29 March 2021. Council received 547 webpage
page views, the average time on the webpage was 7 minutes 24 seconds, and 67 submissions were
made (users were required to balance the budget before a submission was allowed). The software
provider (Bang the Table) was consulted regarding the activity levels for the tool, with Bang the Table
advising that the activity was higher than what they would usually see with other councils utilising
the balance the budget tool for budget engagement for the first time.

The two graphs below highlight the average overall balance the budget (BTB) submitted amounts
compared to Council’s current spending priorities (i.e. current 2020/21 budget) and proposed
spending priorities identified to date in developing the draft 2021/22 budget. It should be noted that
the graphs represent averages across all of the 67 submissions made, with individual submissions
including both increases and decreases in expenditure for specific expenditure categories (outlined
in the table below the graphs and also in Attachment 1).




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