The city of Estevan is taking a look at its budget, with the final version to be shown in tonight's council meeting.
From that, the Estevan Chamber of Commerce has put together a survey of local businesses and what they think of the upcoming budget.
Executive Director Merissa Scarlett says they learned a bit even if the responses were limited.
"We put out the survey to our members for about two weeks just to see what they thought about the proposed city budget and we received seven official responses. That being said, it's a small amount, so there is some increased error margin, but at the same time it also provided some really thoughtful comments and some trends, everybody was on the same page and so that was very insightful for us."
Scarlett says that as a whole the businesses that did respond were positive regarding the new city budget.
"The trend in there was in favour of the proposed budget. Most people are satisfied or very satisfied and the business community was happy to see debt repayment and investments being made in infrastructure."
"As far as concerns, umm, there were some concerns with the 2 per cent property tax increase. But then there was some other comments in there about just looking at where else that money could go forward. So like a field house ice rink complex, something for our kids in the colder months was brought up."
"I thought it was a really good comment, people were well aware of the open houses in the public feedback, which was great. I think that's a great move from City Council and the staff. Just for a way to show how that feedback was used. I thought it was a very insightful comment, is just how will they now show that feedback was taken into consideration?"
With more informal conversations outside of the survey, Scarlett says she heard similar sentiments from local businesses.
"Most people were pretty accepting of the 2 per cent property tax increase, understanding that the cost of everything has gone up and 2 per cent seemed fairly reasonable and it compared to smaller cities that we're hearing about what's been talked about, so I know that was welcomed. Most people were in favour of the choice to invest in some of our infrastructure, like our water, the boilers in the Leisure Centre and the City Hall."
In the future, Scarlett hopes to see more engagement with these surveys to hear from more people in the community.
"For us, I'd really like to get more engagement with it, so I will be looking at how do we get more people to respond. I'd like to get more of our members engaged and more businesses because we had a couple of non-members, but still business owners reply which I think is great. So publicizing it more and maybe making it even simpler."
Scarlett says the city's own feedback period for the budget was ideal.