Over the last few months, civic-minded Brooklynites have been busy meeting and reviewing a wide range of ideas for capital-budget projects in Park Slope and surrounding communities. They are taking part in City Councilmember Brad Lander’s participatory budgeting process, which allows citizens to suggest how their tax dollars should be spent and vote on the proposals.
Lander — along with fellow Councilmembers Melissa Mark-Viverito, Eric Ulrich, and Jumaane Williams — is helping to make history, as this effort is the first time councilmembers are dedicating a portion of their discretionary funds to such an open process as participatory budgeting. Residents joining in the process are expected to review and decide on which projects to recommend in March, with implementation and monitoring of these efforts to begin the following month.
Lander has dedicated approximately $1 million toward participatory budgeting this year. (Some $6 million will be made available to projects in all four Council districts.) He launched the process for District 39 in October 2011 by holding five neighborhood assemblies. On Oct. 5, more than 150 Park Slope residents came to the Old First Reformed Church on Seventh Avenue to share ideas, propose projects, brainstorm, and debate their neighborhood’s future. Facilitators then formed small groups in which attendees could discuss and document each capital expenditure idea, no matter how kooky or ambitious. Some residents then volunteered to act as “budget delegates” — constituents who took responsibility for turning the nascent, organic ideas into concrete proposals.
The councilmember’s office organized the proposals from all five assemblies into a comprehensive spreadsheet that was presented at the first general delegate meeting, on Nov. 6 at P.S. 230. At that meeting, budget delegates played a creative game of Jeopardy to learn more about the City Council budget and how capital expenditures are allocated. Each participant also received Introduction to the Budget Delegate Role, a manual that explained the criteria for evaluating ideas and outlined the types of projects eligible for capital funding.
Budget delegates then broke off into several different committees, covering parks and recreation, transit, public safety and sanitation, education, streets and sidewalks, cultural and community facilities, and the environment. Participants exchanged information and held brief discussions with facilitators from Lander’s office.
Since November, facilitators and budget delegates have been meeting in their committee groups. They have spoken to city agencies and toured the many neighborhoods of Council District 39, which includes parts of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Kensington, Borough Park, and Windsor Terrace. Delegates are faced with the challenge of choosing proposals that best meet the needs of a diverse community spread over a rather large area of the borough.
Committee delegates are now in the process of figuring out which proposals are feasible, ensuring the proposals are eligible for city capital dollars, calculating the costs, and turning the hundreds of ideas into about 30 solid proposals (four or five per committee) to put on the ballot for a vote in March by residents of Lander’s district.
The process has generated some very concrete, reasonable ideas, Lander noted, such as improvements in schools, in parks, on streets, and at subway stations.
The idea behind participatory budgeting is not just to foster transparency in discretionary spending, which has often been plagued by scandals in the City Council. The process will also allow people from diverse neighborhoods to meet, exchange ideas, and take concrete action to improve their communities. The hope is that the new process of funding will lead to greater civic participation and a more politically involved constituency that has a better understanding of neighborhood needs.
For more information, visit the Participatory Budgeting in New York City website, at pbnyc.org. You can also receive updates about local projects at bradlander.com/pb/signup.
— Joni Kletter is a participatory budgeting delegate for District 39’s Parks and Recreation Committee and its Parks Improvement Subcommittee.
from the Winter 2012 Civic News
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