North Perth's 2021 budget chair, councillor Dave Johnston, says council has settled on the budget, and they will now seek public input.
Johnston says a video will be available on the YourSayNorthPerth website, where residents can learn about the budget this year and provide comments to council, who hope to pass the budget officially on March 1st. Johnston adds the pandemic made it more difficult to bring the numbers all together and settle on a tax levy increase.
"The levy increase currently where we sit is at 1.7 percent. It was a very challenging budget to do online, we actually had most councillors with two computers running. One with the WebX so they could be seen and heard, and one with the E-book with the numbers in front of them."
Johnston says they are hoping that since the public consultation is all online this year that way more people decide to offer input to the North Perth budget. He says there are a number of capital projects to get done this year in North Perth, including right now with the old Memorial Arena being torn down in Listowel, where a memorial garden will be erected for the victims of the 1959 arena roof collapse.
"We have two designs that we had a survey on YourSayNorthPerth for, and the company that did the designing will come back to us after they take all those comments in, and come back with a final design to council sometime in the next month or two."
Other projects include the Albert Street storm trunk and Line 84 reconstruction getting finished, and the introduction of a new facade improvement program for local businesses will be introduced later this year. Johnston says the program is incredibly important, even more so because of the impact on local businesses courtesy of COVID-19.
"I think it gives businesses that boost, it gives our businesses a little shot in the arm. It says 'Yea, we're behind you, we're with you,' let's carry on with getting some improvements here and keep people shopping local."
