A new year, a new budget gap.

The welts from its last round of budget encounters with the people of Philadelphia still sting, but the Nutter Administration still must deliver some more bad fiscal news. As Mayor Michael Nutter announced a week ago, continued weakness in the local economy and city tax receipts will force a new round of budget cuts as big as the last one.  The target is to close a second $1 billion shortfall that could develop over the next five years.

After being blistered by public anger last year over how it chose to close the first gap and how it communicated its decisions, the administration seems willing to try something different in the way of civic engagement.

Different, as in the next round of budget forums will be convened and led not by the city itself, but by an outside “honest broker” - the Penn Project for Civic Engagement.  This team from the University of Pennsylvania led the civic dialogues for the Delaware riverfront project, the Great Expectations  project and the Kimmel Center re-envisioning.

Different, as in a new format.  Rather than having citizens, in that ancient ritual, stride to the microphone to berate city officials serially, these forums will ask citizens to work together in smaller groups to review the city’s fiscal options and to give city officials concrete, meaningful input into how to handle a set of hard choices.

Different, as in citizens get a chance this time to offer their views before the final budget decisions get made, not after.

One difference is not ideal, but has been compelled by a shortage of time.  Only four forums will be held, rather than eight (the number for the last round).  This means, unfortunately, that some large chunks of the city won’t play host to a forum - but the Penn Project for Civic Engagement has tried to find community-based sites large enough to handle a crowd of 200 or so people.

The schedule for the round of forums, called Tight Times, Tough Choices, was just released today.  All forums begin with registration at 6:15 pm.  Registration is vital to the process of dividing participants into evenly sized, diverse working groups.

The program will run from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.  Here are the dates and sites:

Thursday, Feb. 12. — St. Dominic’s School,  8510 Frankford Ave.   (Northeast)

Wednesday, Feb. 18 — Mastery Charter School, Pickett Campus, 5700 Wayne Ave (Germantown)

Thursday, Feb 19 — St. Monica’s Catholic School, 16th and Porter Streets.  (South Philadelphia)

Monday, Feb. 23 - Pinn Memorial Baptist Church, 2251 N. 54 TH Street (West Philadelphia)

How will these forums work?

First, in early February, city budget officials will give the Penn Project for Civic Engagement their most up-to-date information about the revenue shortfall, and what budget cuts (or new taxes and fees) are being considered to close the gap.

From that data, the project will try to put together a list of budget choices that citizens can review, discuss and vote upon in a 90 minute workshop session, about 20 citizens to a group.  Depending on how many cuts are being considered, citizens may be given a full list, or a shorter one with a representative sampling.  The full list will be made public, but the goal is to avoid overwhelming citizens with data.

Instead, they’ll get a manageable list of representative choices that they can review and discuss in the time available.  The hope is that citizens can give city officials a clear sense of their priorities, their preferred ways of handling trade offs, and a sense of what values lie beneath those preferences. The values discussion could offer city officials guidance on how to approach budget choices that might not get specifically covered in the workshops.

The event will open with a panel discussion, in which journalists will question top city officials to get a clear sense of the city’s fiscal picture, how things got this bad, and how this set of possible cuts and other steps was developed.

Then citizens will be broken up into the smaller working groups. Each working session will be guided by an experienced moderator trained by the Penn Project.

For those who want to give individual testimony, as well as taking part in the group deliberations, opportunities will be provided to offer short videotaped statements and to post handwritten suggestions, comments, ideas and opinions on a public “wailing wall.” All of this input will be gathered and conveyed to city officials, along with the results of the workshop sessions.

City officials have promised to weigh the input from the forums, and to report back to citizens on how their input was reflected in the proposed budget that Mayor Nutter will present to Council in March.

WHYY is a special media partner of this effort.  Chris Satullo, WHYY’s new executive director of news and civic dialogue, is a co-founder of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, along with Penn’s Dr. Harris Sokoloff. Those two are designing the process for the workshops.

Look for regular updates on the city’s fiscal crisis and these citizen workshops at whyy.org,  on the It’s Our City and It’s Our Money blogs.