Two of the blogs It’s Our City tracks are asking their readers if Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter will really incorporate the findings from the on-going budget workshops.  We won’t know for sure until he releases his budget proposal on March 19 to City Council. Since WHYY is helping the Penn Project for Civic Engagement put on these forums, we certainly hope he incorporates some of the things citizens are saying.

Daniel Urevick-Ackelsberg of Young Philly Politics attended the 2nd workshop held in Germantown on Wednesday night. He complains that the worksheets don’t give citizens the option to cut individual elements of programs.

For example, I think it is unfair, inhumane and bizarrely stupid that we have about 1,000 people in jail (at a cost of more than 30k per year per prisoner) who are accused of non-violent offenses, who are deemed not to be safety risks, but who cannot afford the nominal bail that is set for them. If you or I were ever accused of a crime like low-level possession, someone would come forward with the couple hundred bucks and bail us out. But if you are poor, you sit in jail, and we as a City pay for it. It is just so dumb. Yet, that proposal was bundled together with inhumane options, such as overcrowding our jails. So, a small majority voted no, because they didn’t want more overcrowding. If the proposals were separate, we would have easily earned ‘points’ and advocated for a humane policy. Many things like that came up throughout the session.

Dan UA, his nom de plume on his blog, also wonders whether the workshops are only an exercise in civic engagement that could fall on deaf ears.

I hope the goal isn’t just to show us how hard it is, which our moderators also didn’t stop talking about. We know it is hard! As one of our civic leaders said, who was also in the session with me… We will see.

On the City Paper’s blog The Clog, Doron Taussig writes that some criticism of the workshops is premature.

On Tuesday, I posted about how some people seem to have made up their minds about Mayor Nutter’s budget process: Before Nutter has done anything, they’re arguing that the whole thing is a dog-and-pony show….I guess this really comes down to whether the forums are designed to communicate popular will to the mayor, and whether the mayor actually sits down with whatever document he’s given at the end of them and looks at it. We’ll probably never know about the latter. I’m planning on attending a forum next week to form my own opinion on the former.

We want to know what you think. Do you have faith that Mayor Nutter actually will incorporate some of the recommendations from these citizen budget workshops?