Today I attended the city council meeting because the public input on the 2012 budget was scheduled for tonight. When they got to that section I stood up and they all looked...startled. As if no one had ever stood up to give public input before. Which, in fact, no one ever has.

I said that seeing as how the city is looking into adopting a Livable Streets policy, it would be a positive move to formalize some percentage of the transportation budget be spent on bike/ped. Preferably a slightly larger percentage than what we have been spending on that. Which is a little hard to calculate, because we've had SRTS and MFH grants lately, that have paid for sidewalks and bike lanes. And because some of it comes from capital improvement and some of it comes from transportation. If you look at it one way, it seems that the bike/ped budget is 13% of the total transportation budget. But if you were to take away capital improvements and grants, there is no way bike/ped gets 13% of transportation. We didn't discuss that exactly, mainly because no one knew that 13% off the top of their heads (I calculated it later with some extra information the Public Works Director gave me).

The really crazy part is that I had spent 15 minutes that morning reading the proposed budget. Mainly the transportation part. I wanted to know two things: What is the annual city budget ($25 million) and what is the annual transportation budget ($1.7 million). (It's a small city. Population 17K.)

My 16-yr-old daughter commended me for getting involved.