Should the City Pursue Participatory Budgeting? – On Tuesday night, Councilmember Lucas Frerichs noted, as the council began to ponder almost overwhelming and insurmountable budget challenges, the utter lack of public participation in the process at this point.
Councilmember Frerichs noted that he was interested in pursuing participatory budgeting. He said that he is glad that the budget process was being engaged earlier in the cycle than it was last year when the council got the budget in June and had to act quickly to pass it before the end of the month.
However, he pointed out, “I would be remiss to say that when (Mayor) Joe (Krovoza) calls for public comment, on this item, you can literally hear crickets in the room because it’s so quiet and there’s not really anyone in the room to make public comment whatsoever on an item that is as important as this.”
Councilmember Frerichs argued for at least looking at the notion of participatory budgeting. He noted the city of Vallejo is engaging in the process now, and that it would require discussions to begin in the fall and then the council would have the option as to whether to take up the public’s suggestions.
The budget challenges remain daunting for the city. While the city manager said on Tuesday that he believes they have dealt with the additional pension pressure that will be placed on the city budget, he is projecting the budget deficit to open up to about $6 million in the next five years. A large chunk of that is the new water rates that will increase costs to the general fund for the city’s water use from about $800,000 to $3 million.
In addition, grappling with the pavement issue will eat up at least $3 million a year, perhaps more.
A big advocate for Participatory Budgeting is Nancy Price, who sees it as a “a tool that gives authority to the citizens of Davis to participate directly in the ‘construction’ of city budgets and setting priorities through a process of neighborhood and city-wide discussions and negotiations.”
“I bet if this process had been in place the past years, funds would not have been spent on different and essential priorities and would have represented the will of the people and not the political priorities of City Council members,” she pointed out in a comment earlier this week on the Vanguard. “Would the community have agreed to creating the huge unfunded liabilities for the police and firefights; would road maintenance have been neglected; would $6 and now $10 million have been spent on a water project before there was any vote what-so-ever of the people?”
On the other hand, as Councilmember Rochelle Swanson noted, two years ago, the city attempted to have public workshops, but there was not much attendance there, either.
In May of 2011, the Vanguard ran a series of columns decrying the lack of public engagement in the water issue, even as the ratepayers were facing a tripling of the water rates. When did the public start to engage on the issue? When the Prop 218 notices were sent out, and suddenly the ratepayers had the potential bills in front of them.
By the end of the process, in September of 2011, the public was fully engaged on the issue.
So, yes, Councilmember Lucas Frerichs was correct that we get much more participation when a state agency has coyotes killed than we do when the council is discussing the budget in abstract. But when the issue turns to cutting the fire department staffing, cutting funding for the ACME theater, or closing a pool, the public is suddenly engaged and showing up in large numbers.
So, would participatory budgeting work in Davis? Could we get enough people to engage on the issue in advance to make it worthwhile?
That is an open question.
As we saw with council discussion on the pavement issue, it is an overwhelming dilemma. Already on Wednesday, the Vanguard community had a good discussion of whether we should prioritize streets or fund both streets and bike paths as needed. That is the type of discussion that the public needs to be engaged in.
a. Streets: In this scenario, the City will require a total budget of $139.5 million for the next twenty years with around 5.4% allocated for preventive maintenance in order to maintain the current backlog of $21 million. The PCI will increase from 62 to 70 in twenty years.
b. Bicycle Paths: The City will need a total budget of $13.1 million to maintain the same unfunded backlog as in 2012. This scenario would help improve the PCI of the network to 69 by 2032.
While the bike paths are not cheap, they represent only one-tenth of the cost of roadways to maintain. You have a city that has been built on the image of being the bicycling capital of the world. Critics of city policies point out that up on the street from the Bike Museum is the main road through town that is dangerous for bicyclists to ride on.
In a participatory budgeting mode, the public could work out at least some of these priorities.
The city is also contemplating cutting one fire staffer. A number of people from the public have objected to this, fearful that it will decrease public safety. But without cuts to fire, the city would have to find either additional areas to cut or find new revenue.
The other bargaining units, unlike the firefighters’ union and DCEA, have already taken their contract concessions. Moreover, most departments have had layoffs and attrition. The fire department has had some attrition, but that has actually worked to the benefit of the firefighters, who have gotten overtime in exchange for additional work hours.
City Manager Steve Pinkerton on Tuesday floated a longer-range question to the council, and that is whether they would be willing to consider either new or increased voter-approved revenues.
These are all questions that will ultimately go before the public, and perhaps could benefit from a participatory process. But without participation, the model wouldn’t work.
The alternative is a middle course. The city was highly successful when they turned over the issue of the WAC, not to the public at large, but to a group of citizens who could devote the time to study the water issue.
Perhaps the solution is before us, and what we really need is a WAC for the budget.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Conceptually, public participation in any aspect of government operations and expenditures is lauded as being “true representative government.” The public participation process also increases the confidence of elected representatives when a clear mandate is obtained by this process. At least one council member is vainly hoping that will occur.
Regrettably, When it comes to the budget process, clarity of purpose and direction is almost never achieved. Prolonged delay and wide-shared public dissatisfaction is.
This predicted failure and frustration is difficult to say publicly as it sounds so cynical. But the historical precedent and reality is that from the very beginning of the public participation process in budget policy, groups on either side of the podium will be operating at cross purposes. It’s doomed to fail.
When the public is invited to participate in budget discussions, responders will mostly be comprised of vested interests; union groups, groups who receive direct benefit from a current city service, and other individuals and vendors with some degree of self-interest in a particular facet of the city budget. A final group of proponents come forth pleading for a worthy social or cultural cause. Because we are talking budget here, the specific interest is economic.
Understandably, they will plea for the maintenance or increase of a specific city service that economically benefits them or the group they represent. Out of a sense of impending fear and desperation, some proponents will employ emotion, volume, and recruited numbers of supporters to augment–or substitute–for a argument on a budget program retention.
Summarizing the intent of this public effort is easy: Keep or increase what we already have.
The problem lies in the economic reality that it’s not a question of keeping, its reducing or eliminating, and rarely is citizen guidance offered to the Council what should be sacrificed as economic necessity requires. A public speaker is uncomfortable pointing to the person in the row in front of him and saying, “Eliminate his program.”
The other solution, raising taxes and fees, well, don’t look for any effective lobbying for that option.
The end result of public debate on budgeting decisions is inevitable cuts are further delayed, creating even a greater debt. The public hope for success in program preservation is raised by participation, only for somebody to be bitterly disappointed when their pleas are not met.
David: Is it legal for a municipality like Davis to impose a gas sales tax?
I have no idea what the annual gas consumption is within the city limits to determine the rate that would be necessary to fund road repair. So I would not know whether we would be talking a fraction of cent or a cent a gallon or more.
Roads are a public good. However, citizens driving their private cars on public roads derive the greatest share of the benefit. Therefore the drivers of private cars should own up to their proportional share of the cost. Since one must purchase gas to utilize the public roads, a gas tax would be an equitable vehicle (pun intended…) for sharing the burden.
When we start discussing taxation of any kind, we will hear the typical reactionary arguments against it. With sales taxes, sales leakage is always trotted out. If the average gas purchase is 10 to 15 gallons, are the citizens of Davis really going to forgo the convenience of filling up at home and hold out until they get to Woodland or Sacramento over 10 or 15 cents?
I don’t believe a gas tax is an option.
I agree 100% with Mr. Coleman here. In terms of governance best-practice, budgeting should always be a top-down executive decision process. The prerequisites include a well-vetted operational strategy identifying all goals and objectives, and then sound and rigorous fiscal management that incorporates all the needed measurement and reporting while the money is being spent and revenue is coming in. The development of the operational strategy is where the bottom-up input comes from. But once the plan is finalized, asking for bottom-up decision participation on spending decisions is akin to giving the fleet car keys to the students of the elementary school.
I agree with some of that but not all.
First, there are decisions that need to be made on the type and amount of city services we offer.
Second, there are decisions that will go before the voters at some point on new revenues.
Both in terms of prioritization of services and funding, it is perfectly appropriate to put it into the public realm.
I think there is a great deal of wisdom in Phil Coleman’s remarks here and I do not find them cynical. I worked in participatory processes for community development for many years. These were in very poor (economically) and mostly small rural communities in Africa but there are some lessons from them that resonate with Phil’s remarks. I think participatory processes that seek to include a broad array of voices in a community are useful for wrestling with broad issues of community need and priorities and laying out options for dealing with them. Such processes are also GREAT for identifying community assets–strengths and resources the community has outside of the formal (government) domain. I don’t think we have done a lot in Davis identifying community assets in this way.
I don’t think such processes work well for budgeting decisions (beyond, again, broad categories) especially when serious cuts or shifts in expenditures are called for. I am willing to learn more about how participatory budgeting works but I think Phil lays out the challenges ahead. There is simply no easy way to develop anything resembling consensus in times such as these.
I know many will disagree with me but I believe that our current system with a strong city manager and engaged City Council is the best way forward to make the difficult decisions we need. The CC must translate its broad objectives into specific guidance for the City Manager who then takes the input and crafts a budgetary plan for further discussion. I realize that when the budget is presented many folks will descend on the Chambers to defend this or that program or expenditure category. So be it.
In the end, when all the public comment is done I STILL expect the CC to make the final decision and I will support them when they do, even if I do not agree with everything they do. The only tweak I could suggest to include more public engagement would be to bring representatives of the various commissions together in a public budget roundtable to discuss priorities and needs. Unfortunately, I am not sure that our commissions map clearly into budgetary categories that make sense (for example, we have no “transportation” commission (yet) but arguably need one as we consider funding for roads/paths).
[i]Both in terms of prioritization of services and funding, it is perfectly appropriate to put it into the public realm.[/i]
There is a need for a balanced approach. We honor representative governance for a reason.
There are costs associated with the benefit of vetting decision to a popular opinion.
1. You tend to spend more and fragment the spending more trying to appease a larger and more fractured group all pursuing their own self-interests.
2. Once invited to participate in the decision process, for every person or group that you please, you cause greater resentment with those left out of the spending priorities.
3. You establish a greater sense of decisions participation entitlement. This then creates long-term difficulty for leaders to lead as protesting activists spout where they otherwise would have remained dormant.
Best practices include a separation between planning and execution. What we lack in our government budget process is planning robustness and then accountability and reporting for sticking to the final plan. Without those two things, it is a waste of time to invite a bunch of citizens to the table to provide input. We have no way of knowing if that final plan was well vetted. We have no way of knowing if the plan is accurate and sustainable. We have no way of knowing if we are actually sticking to the plan.
I would focus on these things first:
1. Developing/adopting a robust and effective bottom-up planning process.
2. Implement a way to publish and present the plan to the public.
3. Implement a measurement process to help ensure: 1 – we are sticking to the plan, 2 – that the plan is accurate and not in need of change.
4. Implement a plan change management process.
Once these things are in place, we should open up for public input as part of the this set of processes, not in any ad-hoc fashion resulting from a random suggestion.
There are plenty of models out there we should consider adopting in terms of budget governance.
What kind of participatory budgeting are we talking about?
There are ways to do participatory budgeting without a need of consensus.
For most of these improvement and maintenance issues, if there is no objection other than disagreement in budgeting, one way to implement democracy is as follow:
1. For each program, define the minimum fund the program needs in order to do any reasonable amount of work, and maximum estimation of fund needed to complete the work.
2. Divide the budget-able fund per community member, and let each member assign how they would like to spend their portion. During this process, the member can see dynamically how much funding has been allocated for each project, and they may change their allocation until the [b]deadline[/b].
3. When the deadline comes, lock the allocation. Projects that receive more than minimum funding may start. Projects that receive less than minimum funding are postponed. Projects that receive more than maximum funding will redistribute the surplus to other projects.
4. As long as there are projects that are postponed, the members may reallocate their assignment to those postponed projects.
Example:
City has three projects: A, B, C
A needs minimum of $200, maximum of $300
B needs minimum of $100, maximum of $300
C needs minimum of $100, maximum of $200
The budget-able revenue of the City is $300.
The City has three members: X, Y, Z.
Once the projects are defined, X Y Z can concurrently allocate their shares. On the first day, their allocations are like this:
X: A:$100, B:$0, C:$0
Y: A:$40, B:$30, C:$30
Z: A:$0, B:$100, C:$0
The total of the allocation is dynamically reported. By the end of the day, the status is this:
A:$140 -> Not enough to start
B:$130 -> Funded, may start when budget is finalized
C:$30 -> Not enough to start
X Y Z can all see this status. On the second day, seeing that B is well funded, Y decides to fund A. By the end of second day, the status is this:
A:$170 -> Not enough to start
B:$100 -> Funded, may start when budget is finalized
C:$30 -> Not enough to start
If nothing else changes and the deadline is reached, B will be the project that starts. A will still have $100 that he may reallocate. Y will still have $70 that he may reallocate. This process does not require consensus.