It's Our City is a project that uses TV, Radio and Web
to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.NYT embeds reporter in Philly budget zone
Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm - by Dan Pohlig. Filed under: Budget.
Nutter from a New York Times piece about the presidential election.
Mayor Nutter may want to get ready to add to his growing collection of clips of good press from national news outlets. Spotted last night at the citizen’s budget workshop was a reporter from the New York Times who has been in town to learn a little bit more about how the Nutter administration is dealing with this budget crisis. It’s Our Money’s Ben Waxman mentioned that the reporter said something to the effect that he was interested in the citizen’s budget workshops because it doesn’t seem like any other city is taking this route.
I wonder what the 67th Ward (I refuse to be called the 6th Borough) will have to say about our city’s way of dealing with this crisis.
(And just to get one more dig in against those Gothamites… World Champion Philadelphia Phillies!)
February 13th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I agree that this is a story of national importance. I keep on thinking about the cases of citizens banding together in Argentina to figure out how to get control over things when the crisis there spun out of control once they defaulted on their IMF loans. The workshops are incredible examples of both how desperate the situation is and the possibilities (and limitations) of deliberative direct democracy.
It’s easy to focus on interest group politics (fire dept, police dept, health care workers, etc), but the workshops that I saw (I sat in on parts of probably 5 workshops) showed that people are probably more capable of making these cuts responsibly than the mayor has been. It’s true that most groups didn’t get close to 100 points, but I think that the momentum of the meetings was such that by the end people were more wiling to make the big cuts that could get to 100 if they had more time or perhaps another session. It’s not like the mayor would decide on these cuts in and hour and a half either.