Just a reminder: Mayor David Condon is hosting a Telephone Town Hall tonight (June 12) at 6pm to ask the public for input on the 2014 budget and community priorities.

Residents will be contacted using technology that allows the City of Spokane to call thousands of people to ask if they want to participate in the meeting. Citizens can also opt into the meeting by calling (888) 409-5380 between 6 and 7pm tonight.

Mayor Condon will introduce the proposed 2014 Programmatic Budget in August. The line-ttem budget will be delivered weeks in advance of the November deadline.

The Telephone Town Hall is the first of several opportunities for the public to provide input on the 2014 budget. Additional opportunities include:

• Community presentations by members of the mayor’s cabinet
• New ways to engage citizens through the City’s website, spokanecity.org and MySpokaneBudget.org, a new budget-focused tool that will launch in August
• Meetings hosted by neighborhood councils
• Weekly budget hearings hosted by the City Council in November

As the city enters the 2014 budget process, they are claiming that significant improvements have been realized in affordability, accountability and alignment. Those efforts have supposedly focused on being more efficient in how the city does business, and they have tightened the gap between revenues and expenses to less than half of the $10 million shortfall the city faced last year.