It's Our City is a project that uses TV, Radio and Web
to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.Reports from 1st Budget Workshop Show the Difficulty in Balancing City Budget
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 1:45 pm - by Its Our City Staff. Filed under: Budget.
The Tight Times, Touch Choices workshops on the city fiscal crisis began Thursday.
About 550 people came to St. Dominic’s School in the lower Northeast to offer input in any or all of three forms:
1) Two minute videotaped testimonies. You can see those through a link on an earlier It’s Our City blog post.
2) Written comments on a community “wailing wall.” More than 100 of those were received and are being transcribed. They’ll be posted here shortly.
3) Taking part in a workshop where citizens jointly talked through and voted upon an array of budget options, both service cuts and tax and fee hikes, that the Nutter administration is considering to close an on-going, $200 million a year budget gap.
On the worksheets citizens used for this exercise, each possible action was assigned a point value, based on how much it would do - either by cutting costs or raising revenues - to close the gap.
Each group was challenged to approve a list of actions that added up to 100 points - equivalent to balancing the budget.
They did so, working with moderators from the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, by first sorting the actions into four buckets:
1) Low-hanging Fruit - Items that 75 percent of the group could swiftly agree should be done.
2) No Way, No Hows - Actions that a 75 percent majority agreed should NOT be done, no matter what.
3) Shared Pain - Actions that people originally wanted to avoid, but concluded should be done _ after discussion and by a 51 percent majority vote.
4) Gut Wrenchers - Actions that people really, really wanted to avoid, but were led to reconsider after early efforts to close the gap fell short. Approved after discussion by a 51 percent vote.
As you’ll see, the various groups approached their work very differently: one group got to 99 points, effectively closing the gap; another got only to 2 points.
Similar reports will be filed after the next three workshops, Wednesday at Mastery Charter School (Pickett Campus) in Germantown, Thursday at St. Monica’s Catholic School in South Philadelphia and next Monday at Pinn Memorial Baptist Church in West Philadelphia.
Group 1 - 40 points
Group 2 - 34 points
Group 3 - 58 points
Group 4 - 74 points
Group 5 - 49 points
Group 6 - 71 points
Group 7 - 26 points
Group 8 - 99 points
Group 9 - 73 points
Group 10 - 57 points
Group 11 - 2 points
Group M - 56 points
Related links:
Philadelphia Inquirer on why the Nutter administration is seeking more public input on the budget process.
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:49 pm
[...] read a good rundown of what each group decided, along with some choice quotes from the groups at It’s Our City’s report (WHYY is a co-organizer of the four workshops). Each group received pieces of paper with a [...]