Today, Los Angeles County CEO Bill Fujioka presents a proposed annual budget to the Board of Supervisors. To help constituents understand the context and breadth of services that make up the County’s over $23 billion budget, Supervisor Don Knabe has launched a “You Draft the Budget” tool on his website, knabe.com. Constituents can access the site to start drafting their budget by going to knabe.com/draftthebudget.
“This is the first step in a process that will launch our new fiscal year on July 1st. As yet, we don’t know the impact of the State and Federal budgets and how they will affect County services. The County budget is different than the State and many city budgets because nearly 90% of it is for programs that the Federal and State governments mandate us to provide,” said Supervisor Knabe. “With a budget over $23 billion, we do know it’s complicated! We wanted to give people a chance to ‘follow the money’ and learn more about all the programs the County provides. So, we’re launching this web-based tool to try to explain the County budget and all of our services in a simple and interactive way.”
Supervisor Knabe will also be hosting an online Town Hall meeting on Thursday, April 21st at 2:30pm to update constituents on recent County activities and to discuss the budget. To view the Town Hall, go to Ustream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ask-don-live1) and click the play button. Questions for the Supervisor can be submitted in advance through Twitter@DonKnabe.com or emailed to Ask Don or posted on Facebook.
You can also view the online Town Hall through Facebook by going to http://www.facebook.com/SupervisorKnabe and clicking the play button. Utilizing this feature will allow you to send a question to the Supervisor real time and chat with other viewers about the topics discussed by the Supervisor. Viewers will only be able to submit a live question and chat if they have a Facebook account, but anyone can watch the live town hall without a Facebook account.