The Wailing Wall at the first budget workshop

The city budget: totally off the wall

Someone pleaded with the city not to balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable.

Someone suggested a special tax on “all the rich journalists.”

Someone wrote of how his 91-year-old mother relies on a city health center.

And someone complimented a Penn professor’s tie.

As part of the workshop on the city fiscal crisis last Thursday at St. Dominic’s in the Northeast, citizens were invited to write out a comment, plea, suggestion or howl of outrage on an oversized sticky note and attach it a “wailing wall” at the back of the big meeting room.

It’s taken us just a leeeetle big longer that we expected to type up the yield from that first “wailing wall,” because there were 191 of them. Yep, 191 vivid, forceful, creative and sometimes angry missives.

Click here to read ‘em all.

And come back to It’s Our City in coming days to review similar reports on the wailing walls at the other three workshops (last night in Germantown, tonight in South Philadelphia and Monday in West Philly. The full schedule is on It’s Our City’s home page.)

Look also for the dozens of “Two-Minute Testimonies” our crews taped as citizens gave their views and ideas and reports from the dozen or more breakout groups at each session, written by moderators who led citizens through the exercise of putting themselves in the mayor’s seat and balancing the budget in the best way they could see.