Justice
To Understand the City’s Budget, Write It
To help citizens better understand the budget process, Calgary's mayor let them craft it themselves.
In many cities, there tends to be a barrier between citizens and the officials that run the city. For Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, much of the division can be blamed on TLAs – or, as he tongue-in-cheekily explained recently, the three-letter abbreviations that dominate the language of city officials, but which aren’t often explained to the regular citizen.
To create a better understanding o the inner workings of the city, Nenshi decided to open the process up and give citizens a more detailed – and comprehensible – look at one of the city’s most important functions: creating the budget.