Image credit: Phila Daily News / Signe Wilkinson

Mayor Michael Nutter is expected to announce this morning that the city’s projected revenue gap has worsened. Two months ago, Nutter estimated that future revenues were expected to fall $1.2 billion dollars less than hoped for. The mayor is to hold a news conference at 9:30am in city hall to give us the new number.

Nutter is likely to talk about where the revenue shortfalls are coming from. But don’t expect him to announce a list of new budget cuts today, that’s likely to come later. That’s because the mayor did learn one thing from his recent series of town hall meetings: The public hates surprise budget cuts. So this time, he’s planning to hold a series of four citizen workshops where folks will be asked to put themselves in his shoes.

Harris Sokoloff, the director of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, and a team of trained moderators will help lead discussions at each event.

According to Dr. Sokoloff, one of the goals of these community forums is to get participants to work together on developing priorities and working through the trade-offs they are and are not willing to accept. Participants will consider real city budget information, including cuts under consideration and ideas for new revenue. The City of Philadelphia’s Budget Office will work in partnership with this community forum project, providing this detailed budget information. Top city officials, including the Finance and Budget Directors as well as other senior officials will be at these forums to explain the city’s fiscal outlook.

In turn, the Project for Civic Engagement will share the data it compiles from these community forums with the Nutter Administration as well as post it on their web site.

Additionally, the city will have budget managers in each small breakout group to listen to as citizen deliberate on budget choices. At the end of the four forums, Penn Project for Civic Engagement will post the data on its Web site and prepare a final report illustrating common ideas and trade-offs to submit to the mayor.

I attended a meeting last night between Sokolov and Chris Satullo, the former editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and who now works at WHYY as Executive Director of News and Civic Dialogue and is advising on the project. The two were were still working out the details of where they will be held but I can tell you they will be held in mid Feb. As soon the locations and dates are confirmed, I will be posting them here on the It’s Our City website. They did put together this press release that a few additional details.

For the absolute latest details, live from this morning’s press conference, check out It’s Our City’s Twitter Feed.  We’ll be “tweeting” at least a couple times when we hear the big news about the budget.