Several Hundred crowded the St. Dominic School Auditorium last Thursday for the first of four budget workshops

by Patrick Cobbs

Hundreds of Philadelphia residents crowded the St. Dominic School Auditorium in Northeast Philadelphia Thursday night for the first of four Tight Times, Tough Choices city budget workshops - Steven Pyser was a kid in a candy store.

He helped facilitate one of 12 work groups tasked with delivering plausible scenarios for cutting the city budget by $174 million, the estimated shortfall for fiscal year 2010, which begins in July.

Pyser was happy to help with the budget but, as an activist who has worked to develop participatory democracy for the last eight years, the joy on his face was more about just being there.

“This is what it looks like!” he said.

Even with his job done, the event over and the last of the citizen democrats (small d) braving the gusting winter wind, he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. That’s because this kind of pre-policy citizen advising session has never been done, some say. “That before [policy] is crucial,” said Harris Sokoloff co-founder of the forum’s main organizing body, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement. “It makes part of what we’re doing unprecedented.”

Harris Sokoloff, co-founder of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, warms up the large crowd by stressing the importance of working toward the greater good in the group budget workshops.

I’m inclined to believe him on that. Well, “unprecedented” is a strong word. But as a former suburban journalist I’ve covered lots of school board and small municipal meetings and, with the exception of appointed citizen panels, which, for example, state tax reform was all about a couple years ago, I haven’t seen anything quite like this. Certainly nothing of this scale and not with the potential for policy impact so wide open, if you take city officials at their word.

Bryn Mawr student Anna Gadzinski was part of a visible contingent at the forum representing Project Home.

Before these hundreds broke into their work groups and started to make their mock budget cuts, the city’s Managing Director, Dr. Camille Barnett gave a few of those words about what the city wanted to get out of the night. “What we’re interested in is the kinds of consensus you can come to and the kinds of trade offs you make,” she said.

“What is being said here is going to be listened to,” said Patrick Morgan, the assistant managing director who elaborated later on. He and every other city official who strolled through the place seemed equally on message. “We might not be able to do everything, but we’re listening.”

But amid the hope and newness of it all one thing was conspicuously familiar to me at this event. People were angry. Not all of them, and not low-blow-in-center-ring angry, but still angry despite all the effort to make this thing about citizen input.

The Wailing Wall seemed to be one of the best used facilities of the night

And there was clearly a lot of that effort. Three video testimony booths, which by my count recorded at least 54 You Tube type messages, a Wailing Wall that was plastered with Post-its, and a group of facilitators who I experienced as being very open to recording personal input within the work groups (especially considering the short time and difficult task parameters). Yet still anger. Or at least dissatisfaction.

Take Northeast resident Jim Curran who started his work session with a friendly grilling of City Councilman Bill Green. The councilman popped in for a look at the work groups, as many city officials were doing all night. Curran asked if council had reduced its budget.

“Council has taken a 10-percent reduction across the board so far and I expect we’ll do more,” Green said. “Some council members have not taken a personal cut.” Green took a five percent cut, he later said.

Like many, Stan Strez, 65, of Bridesburg found the parameters for the group tasks too constricting, but even though he ducked out of group work early he remained at the forum to the end.

But it wasn’t long before Curran was up and out. “This is all putting us down a cattle shoot - the questions have already been prepared,” he said of the workshop design. “It’s too pat, it’s all too pat. You should put this in the paper or something so we can study ahead of time.”

And Curran wasn’t alone. I saw others leave their workshops in similar frustration. One was Stan Strez, 65, of Bridesburg. He was so frustrated that he initially told me to “beat it” when I asked for his name, because he thought I worked for the city.

His gripe?

“This is ridiculous. Cutting jobs on the police force? There’s gonna be so much crime its ridiculous.” Later he explained a bit more, “They’re not including everything [in the budget scenarios]. And not just that, they’re not addressing what the real problem is coming from.”

What that is, according to Strez, is corruption and mismanagement all up the line.

I heard several other participants echo Strez’s call for more ambitious budget cutting scenarios. Some of the suggestions that I heard, which were not included in the options available for groups to vote on, were repealing the ten-year tax abatement on new construction, forcing existing offices to run more efficiently (although you could argue that is included in any staff or budget reduction) and, though I didn’t hear it said, just about everything in Tom Ferrick’s “How the city can save 600 million” article series.

In fact, if you read down the list of 26 cost cutting or revenue generating items that each group was asked to choose among, nearly all of the cost cutting efforts represent reductions in services by eliminating programs, staff layoffs or budget reductions, and nearly all of the revenue generating ideas are elevations in taxes. None are tax reforms such as eliminating the tax abatement or equalizing the property tax. And none are changes in union contracts or city-to-state or federal payment ratios for things like First Judicial District operating costs.

In other words it seemed like much of the frustration was justified. If people came to this event hoping to see a city government that was ready to make the really hard choices and fix the budget problem so it won’t happen again, a look in the workshop information packet would probably disappoint.

Shelah Harper is a Germantown resident who made the trek east for this meeting primarily because of her concerns about the city’s community health centers. She wanted to do all she could to keep any of the centers from being shut down.

Managing Director Barnett explained these types of budget choices were necessitated by the short-term turn around time on the budget. The argument goes: the city has to have a balanced budget proposal by mid-March so most of the potentially more satisfying solutions, like tax reform or reduced pension contributions, would take too long to get done.

The results of this approach in all of the work groups I visited were concessions to program cuts that none of the members seemed to like. And this even in groups that barely made it half way to their cost cutting goal.

It didn’t take long before each of the 12 work groups operating that night were embroiled in difficult decisions. Still people kept it civil. In fact, even though there were spirited times in each of the groups I visited the sense of teamwork was strong.

By the end of the night, I think it’s safe to say, every group was in “gut wrenching” territory. That being the category for cuts that no one wanted to make. To my eyes, for each group I visited there seemed little hope of achieving the budgetary goals without including cuts to fire, police or prisons and possibly all three. The first two, especially, being universally unpopular.

People seemed a little tired as they filed out of the building near ten o’clock. Still, well over a hundred of them lingered in the auditorium to talk for a while. Some were still disappointed.

Like Jack Morley, 46, of South Philadelphia. “They defined the format and the structure on how the public was giving input, and that hamstrung us,” he said of his group, which only made it half way to its goal.

Or Rick Lewis, 39, and Meghan Aberkane, 31, of Mayfair who both thought the process needed to be longer and more involved. “We needed more information to make informed decisions,” Aberkane said.

But few looked angry anymore. And even though I don’t think many of those I talked to would have called it a perfect night, there were, by then, a lot of smiles around the room.

Steven Pyser said something important at that moment. He still looked like he was in the amusement park after the gates closed. “When you bring citizens back into government they have a higher confidence in their elected officials.”

Maybe.

Me, I think of all those other meetings I’ve been to. Different people. Different towns. Different agendas on the table. Same anger and frustration. I might have seen some of that move on Thursday night. Why? Could be some folks just started to feel heard.