Philadelphia gives citizens a US $1 million say on spending as COVID-19 squeezes budgets

Source: Cities Today Published: December 15th

Philadelphia is launching its first participatory budgeting initiative to allow direct community involvement in city spending decisions.

This is alongside a range of measures to solicit broader input into the city’s overall budget spending, with a particular focus on racial equity.

The measures come amid difficult financial decisions for cities as COVID-19 hits their budgets hard.

Led by the City’s Budget Office in partnership with the City Planning Commission, the participatory budgeting programme aims to generate ideas for infrastructure investments and will allow residents to vote directly on how to spend US$1 million on capital projects.

A call for spending ideas from the public will go out in the early spring, with the final vote scheduled for June 2021, around the same time that City Council will vote on the FY22 budget.

A Re-Imagining Philadelphia Steering Committee of citizens will help to design the participatory budgeting process and the city has also engaged non-profit Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), which has worked with cities such as Oakland, Boston and Seattle.

Participatory budgeting began in the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil in 1989 and is now used in over 3,000 cities worldwide, including New York, Barcelona and Paris, which allows residents to vote on how they want the city to spend €100 million (US$121 million) – five percent of its capital budget.

Digital platforms are increasingly being deployed to engage more people.

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Photo by Leo SERRAT on Unsplash