This was supposed to be a happy story. A story about a town reeling from bankruptcy, violence, and crime, that brought its residents together with an innovative strategy, one that other cities across the country are trying to emulate. This was to be a story with a happy ending full of community gardens, puppy neutering, and even some repaired roads.
But there are few happy endings in city government these days, with spiraling pension costs, sluggish economic recovery, and Americans’ general fatigue when it comes to civic engagement. And this story is no exception.
It starts in 2011 in Vallejo, a hilly and charming town of 117,000 just a ferry ride from San Francisco. The town’s streets are dotted with pastel Victorian homes and palm trees, its waterfront has a walking path with vistas of distant yellow and green hills, and its population is one of the most diverse in the country, evenly divided among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Filipinos.
But Vallejo has struggled for years. Crippled by high pension costs and public-employee salaries, it filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Things didn’t get much better after the city emerged from Chapter 9 in 2011: Crime was bad and the city’s police department was perpetually short-staffed. There were 10 murders in 2010, 14 in 2012, and 24 in 2013.
Services had been cut to the bone: Dan Keen, the current city manager, said that when he came on board in 2012, every department was operating at staff levels lower than he’d ever seen in his career.
“The city was still shell-shocked, still reeling from the reduction in services,” he told me from his office near the waterfront.
Trying to figure out how to avoid yet another romp through bankruptcy, leaders proposed a 1 percent sales tax in 2011. Residents begrudgingly agreed–50.4 percent of the town voted to adopt the sales tax, and the proposal passed by just 159 votes. One of the opponents’ biggest concerns, voiced by Councilwoman Marti Brown, was that the new revenues would go to employee salaries and pensions, just as much of the town’s money had before, and that residents would be even more tired of Vallejo’s cycle of taxing and spending with nothing to show for it.
Then Brown had an idea.
She’d read about an experiment in Brazil where a local government allowed its residents to suggest and vote on ideas for how to spend tax dollars. The process, with the clunky name Participatory Budgeting, allowed citizens, rather than politicians, to decide how to spend infrastructure dollars. Would this be a way, she wondered, of making sure Vallejo’s money would be spent in a way its residents liked?
“I thought, there’s got to be a better way to do budgeting, there needs to be more transparency,” she said, in an interview. “It was a huge part of what helped propel Vallejo toward bankruptcy–that financial process is not a transparent process. The public doesn’t get to see it, they don’t know anything about it.”
She started talking with the Participatory Budgeting Project, a group that had formed at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2005 in an effort to bring participatory budgeting to the U.S. With their help, Brown made Vallejo’s city council a proposal: Take a chunk of the money raised from the new sales tax, and let Vallejoans spend it how they wished, as long as the ideas they came up with benefited the public and could be implemented by the city or in collaboration with public agencies, non-profits, or religious institutions. The Project had helped Chicago adopt this type of budgeting in its 49th ward, but Brown's idea was bigger: to do it citywide.
When Brown floated the idea, it was not universally popular. This was a city, after all, just recovering from bankruptcy, that needed every penny. The idea of letting residents do almost anything with millions of dollars rubbed some officials the wrong way.
“You are telling a city council that’s just been handed $10 million dollars—after going through years of cutbacks—you can’t decide how that money is going to be spent, “ said Keen, the city manager. “You can understand that for some elected officials, that’s pretty tough.”
But participatory budgeting had made a big difference in some cities in Brazil. In a comprehensive study, academics found that Brazilian cities that allowed citizens to decide what to do with public funds saw lower infant mortality and increased spending on services such as education and sanitation, compared to cities that did not adopt the process.
Brown suggested that this would be a way to help people have faith in their local community once again, and proposed that about one-third of the sales tax money, about $3.2 million, would be set aside for residents to control directly.
Participatory budgeting, or PB, as the residents called it, barely passed in city council when it went up for a vote in April 2012, with Brown and her contingent winning 4-3. Some residents were furious, calling the idea that it would improve democracy “utter nonsense” in letters to the local newspaper, the Vallejo Times Herald. Even the mayor disliked the idea, telling reporters “this is not the time to fund whatever we want.”
Still, many residents were curious. They started showing up at meetings, and taking on tasks: writing the “rule book,” which would govern how the process worked; attending budget assemblies, where residents brainstormed how to spend the money; and joining the steering committee, a group of 21 locals that planned meetings and reached out to locals to get them involved.
Ravi Shankar, a longtime Vallejo resident who joined the steering committee (no, not that Ravi Shankar) said that getting involved in participatory budgeting seemed like a way to put the people-first sentiments of the Occupy movement into use.
“People started coming together in extraordinary ways,” he said.
But there are few happy endings in city government these days, with spiraling pension costs, sluggish economic recovery, and Americans’ general fatigue when it comes to civic engagement. And this story is no exception.
It starts in 2011 in Vallejo, a hilly and charming town of 117,000 just a ferry ride from San Francisco. The town’s streets are dotted with pastel Victorian homes and palm trees, its waterfront has a walking path with vistas of distant yellow and green hills, and its population is one of the most diverse in the country, evenly divided among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Filipinos.But Vallejo has struggled for years. Crippled by high pension costs and public-employee salaries, it filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Things didn’t get much better after the city emerged from Chapter 9 in 2011: Crime was bad and the city’s police department was perpetually short-staffed. There were 10 murders in 2010, 14 in 2012, and 24 in 2013.
Services had been cut to the bone: Dan Keen, the current city manager, said that when he came on board in 2012, every department was operating at staff levels lower than he’d ever seen in his career.
“The city was still shell-shocked, still reeling from the reduction in services,” he told me from his office near the waterfront.
Trying to figure out how to avoid yet another romp through bankruptcy, leaders proposed a 1 percent sales tax in 2011. Residents begrudgingly agreed–50.4 percent of the town voted to adopt the sales tax, and the proposal passed by just 159 votes. One of the opponents’ biggest concerns, voiced by Councilwoman Marti Brown, was that the new revenues would go to employee salaries and pensions, just as much of the town’s money had before, and that residents would be even more tired of Vallejo’s cycle of taxing and spending with nothing to show for it.
Then Brown had an idea.
She’d read about an experiment in Brazil where a local government allowed its residents to suggest and vote on ideas for how to spend tax dollars. The process, with the clunky name Participatory Budgeting, allowed citizens, rather than politicians, to decide how to spend infrastructure dollars. Would this be a way, she wondered, of making sure Vallejo’s money would be spent in a way its residents liked?
“I thought, there’s got to be a better way to do budgeting, there needs to be more transparency,” she said, in an interview. “It was a huge part of what helped propel Vallejo toward bankruptcy–that financial process is not a transparent process. The public doesn’t get to see it, they don’t know anything about it.”
She started talking with the Participatory Budgeting Project, a group that had formed at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2005 in an effort to bring participatory budgeting to the U.S. With their help, Brown made Vallejo’s city council a proposal: Take a chunk of the money raised from the new sales tax, and let Vallejoans spend it how they wished, as long as the ideas they came up with benefited the public and could be implemented by the city or in collaboration with public agencies, non-profits, or religious institutions. The Project had helped Chicago adopt this type of budgeting in its 49th ward, but Brown's idea was bigger: to do it citywide.
When Brown floated the idea, it was not universally popular. This was a city, after all, just recovering from bankruptcy, that needed every penny. The idea of letting residents do almost anything with millions of dollars rubbed some officials the wrong way.
“You are telling a city council that’s just been handed $10 million dollars—after going through years of cutbacks—you can’t decide how that money is going to be spent, “ said Keen, the city manager. “You can understand that for some elected officials, that’s pretty tough.”
But participatory budgeting had made a big difference in some cities in Brazil. In a comprehensive study, academics found that Brazilian cities that allowed citizens to decide what to do with public funds saw lower infant mortality and increased spending on services such as education and sanitation, compared to cities that did not adopt the process.
Brown suggested that this would be a way to help people have faith in their local community once again, and proposed that about one-third of the sales tax money, about $3.2 million, would be set aside for residents to control directly.
Participatory budgeting, or PB, as the residents called it, barely passed in city council when it went up for a vote in April 2012, with Brown and her contingent winning 4-3. Some residents were furious, calling the idea that it would improve democracy “utter nonsense” in letters to the local newspaper, the Vallejo Times Herald. Even the mayor disliked the idea, telling reporters “this is not the time to fund whatever we want.”
Still, many residents were curious. They started showing up at meetings, and taking on tasks: writing the “rule book,” which would govern how the process worked; attending budget assemblies, where residents brainstormed how to spend the money; and joining the steering committee, a group of 21 locals that planned meetings and reached out to locals to get them involved.
Ravi Shankar, a longtime Vallejo resident who joined the steering committee (no, not that Ravi Shankar) said that getting involved in participatory budgeting seemed like a way to put the people-first sentiments of the Occupy movement into use.
“People started coming together in extraordinary ways,” he said.
by Alana Semuels, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Robert Galbraith/Reuters
