By Chris Satullo

They came in waves: firefighters in windbreakers, lawyers in Boyd’s best, activists with fliers in hand, homeless citizens wrapped in anxiety. They chanted, chatted, scowled, smiled, munched and waved to neighbors they hadn’t seen in a while.

They came to have their say, to defend what was precious to them. They got that chance, and something more, a chance to work in a new way with their fellow Philadelphians, to try together to find a path out of the fiscal mess that a plummeting global economy has foisted upon their city.

About 1,800 Philadelphians took part in the four Tight Times, Tough Choices workshops that wrapped up Monday at Pinn Memorial Baptist Church in West Philly. Check out also the reports and photos posted on It’s Our City by independent bloggers whom we invited to cover the events. Check out also the breakout group reports, results, video testimonies and “wailing wall” statements gathered at these events.  Click on the links in the left-hand column on the home page.

This post aims to provide an overview, and a statistical summary, of those mountains of input.

Most of the city residents who showed up for the events were game for the challenging exercise proposed by the event organizer, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement. (Disclosure: I’m co-founder of PPCE and planned the exercise.)

Here what folks were asked to do:

* Scan a list of about 30 actions being considered by the city to close a roughly $200 million annual budget gap, some cost cuts, some revenue raisers such as fees and taxes. Review the point value each action had been assigned, reflecting how much work that action would do to close the budget gap.

* Divide into breakout groups, most often of 20 people or so, and work collaboratively with other Philadelphians to agree upon enough actions to pile up 100 points worth of impact. (In other words, each point represented roughly $2 million worth of impact.)

* Work with a team of PPCE moderators to sort the actions into four buckets:

1) The Low-Hanging Fruit: Actions that the group could agree on quickly. A 75 percent vote was needed to put something in this bucket.

2) The No Way, No Hows: Actions the very thought of which made the group’s blood run cold. Stuff they wanted off the table, post-haste and permanently. Again, a 75 percent vote was needed to stick something in that bucket. (Most groups found it much easier to fill this bucket than the others.)

3) The Shared Pain: The actions people really didn’t want to approve, but realized they would have to consider if they wanted to make it to 100 points. This is where the evenings’ liveliest, most interesting discussions took place. An item could get put onto the Shared Pain list by a simple majority vote.

4) The Gut Wrenchers: These were the really painful ideas that groups’ had rejected earlier, or avoided discussing all night, that ended up getting considered in the last-minute quest to get a decent number of points on the board.

5) A fifth bucket, No Decisions, developed by default. These were actions the groups either never got around to reviewing, or discussed with no clear conclusion. For many groups, that ended up being the biggest bucket of all.

All told, 53 different breakout groups, varying in size from a dozen to a hundred, did the work. They did it in widely varying ways. A few groups got nearly to 100 points, an amazing display of working through painful tradeoffs.  One stubborn group up at St. Dominic’s in the Northeast approved only one item all night, the throwaway item of making the Eagles pay back rent on the Vet.  (Look out, Joe Banner! That was the only item approved by every single one of the breakout groups, and usually as the first thing they did.)

The chart at this link (.pdf) lays out all the results.

Here’s how it is organized: In the first column, you’ll see the action area, followed by the associated point totals.  (For more detail on the options, see the full worksheet here (,pdf).)

Second column: The number of groups that approved the item as Low Hanging Fruit. Some groups fiddled with the actions and point totals to reflect their values (this was encouraged). So in a lot of spots you’ll see a breakdown of citizen-adjusted point values: e.g. 6 groups @ 3 points, 2 groups @ 6 points.

Third column: The number of groups that declared this action a No Way No How, and stuck to its guns all night. (Some groups put an action here initially, but came back to it later as Shared Pain or a Gut Wrencher.)

Fourth column: The number of groups that approved an action under Shared Pain. Here is where most of the fiddling with point values and actions occurred.

Fifth column: These are the Gut Wrenchers, the actions that no one really wanted to do and that may have been initially considered “No Way, No How” but which the group eventually agreed to.  As you can see, not many groups wanted their guts to be wrenched.

Sixth column: The number of groups that either never discussed the item, or talked about it without reaching a firm conclusion. Frequently, an item discussed by rejected as Low Hanging Fruit or No Way, No How ended up staying in that limbo for the rest of the evening, without being revived.

OK, what to make of this mess of numbers?

Actually, they provide a few pieces of pretty clear guidance to city officials. (Many of those officials came to each workshop and sat in the breakout rooms, listening intently to the citizen discussion and (mostly) keeping their views to themselves. This included such high-ranking Cabinet members as Managing Director Camille Barnett, Finance Director Rob Dubow, Budget director Steve Agostini and chief of staff Clay Armbrister.)  The mayor did not attend; we did not want him to. His presence would have turned this workshop into another ultimately pointless parade of people to a microphone, to demand or plead for mutually exclusive things.

Here are some of the clear trends:

* Citizens tended to oppose strongly anything they perceived would harm those services likely to be needed by the people who are must vulnerable in these perilous economic times. For example, human services, public health and housing services got tabbed as a No Way, No How item even more often than did Police or the Free Library.

* After taking cuts to things such as shelter beds and health centers off the table early, many groups decided later in the evening, however grudgingly, that they had to support significant tax hikes to demonstrate how serious they really were about protecting these services to the vulnerable.

* Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison told me he was impressed by how many groups showed interest in the idea of closing a city prison. Many citizens rallied to the notion that enough nonviolent offenders could be released (or alternatively sentenced in the first place) to free up space to bring back all the prisoners now housed, expensively, at suburban jails – or even to close one prison. Citizens uniformly did not want re-entry or job training services cut; they wanted fewer nonviolent offenders in jail. This idea was also considered strongly by a number of groups that ended up not voting for it.

* Support for wage tax increases was strikingly strong. Most of it came near the end of the evening, when people realized they had taken more points off the board than they had put up. This is when, for many citizens, the difficulty of the task of actually having to balance a budget in the real world really hit home.

* Sales tax increases also got a fair amount of the same kind of last-minute support. Hikes in parking and amusement taxes tended to be earlier slam dunks.

* Meanwhile, raising business taxes generated surprisingly (at least to me) little enthusiasm. These taxes were discussed only in a slim minority of groups. The notion that the gross receipts portion of the business privilege tax is unfair and unwieldy seems to have trickled down to the grass roots. A fair amount of grousing could be heard about suburban companies and banks in general not paying their proper share of the BPT.

You’ll see that a notable minority of groups ended up approving cuts to police toward the end of their sessions, in the Shared Pain and Gut Wrencher buckets. Not so with fire, though two groups I moderated had spirited discussions around the notion that perhaps this department should be “right-sized” to fit the city’s declining population.

Following Public Health and Housing as the biggest No Way, Now How items were recreation, human services, libraries fire, police and Fairmount Park. (The Free Library issue got about one-thousandth of the air time it did during the mayoral town meetings last fall. When people saw that library cuts were actually a piddling 1- or 3-point matter in the context of the 100-point challenge, they tended not to waste much time on it. Many groups learned swiftly that they had a consensus to protect libraries. They marked that happily down on their sheets and moved on to tougher calls.)

Many folks were frustrated that “efficiency” or “ending waste and abuse” were not listed as standalone ways to cut costs.  Most disliked intensely the idea of laying off workers; few seemed to grasp that “efficiency” usually means that real live people lose their jobs. (The city doesn’t buy THAT many paper clips; the big money is all in personnel.) Some groups broke down cost cuts to say they would approve savings via leaving unfilled positions dark or cutting exempt salaries or instituting one-week furloughs - but not layoffs.

The real estate tax abatement was a huge issue every night. The item may not have been on the worksheet, but the forums still served to send Mayor Nutter a clear message that most long-time Philadelphians think the abatement is unfair and want it repealed. Few people, in my hearing at least, seem to have any understanding of the point that, if the abatement spurs new housing and new high-income residents to come to Philadelphia, it probably generates more in wage and sales taxes than it gives up in property taxes. In this populist, working class town, the abatement is just seen as a Bush-like sop to the rich, at the expense of natives who’ve ridden out all the hard times here, paid their taxes, and maintained their homes with little fanfare or reward.

As a matter of revenue-generating policy, ending or reducing the abatement is the closest of close calls. As a matter of populist sentiment, it’s a huge applause line.

Another big populist cause at the workshops was PILOTs – “payments in lieu of taxes,” for those of you who are not utter urban policy wonks. These are payments that large nonprofits such as a big university or hospital — which are exempt by law from the real estate tax — might pay to compensate the city for some of the cost of providing basic services to their huge, bustling campuses. Such payments are always negotiated; no law mandates them. In fact, a change in state law in the 1990s damaged the city’s bargaining position in such negotiations, leading to a drop-off in PILOT payments. Nutter’s team clearly heard citizens say the city should push much harder on this front.

Most of those pushing the case for PILOTs seemed to have Penn as their main target. In that Harris Sokoloff, director of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, is a Penn employee, some were quick to spin dark conspiracy theories. I’ve known Harris for a dozen years; he and I founded PPCE together two years ago. The idea that this fervent, idealistic apostle of participatory democracy would do all the intense work he did for these forums simply to help his employer evade a PILOT payment is as unfounded as it is insulting.

The insinuation says far more about the people who made it than it does about Harris Sokoloff.

Many people wondered why the process for the workshops did not more actively engage with the list of issues we called BHAGs, Big, Hairy, Ambitious Goals, on the back page of the worksheet e.g. cutting pension and health care costs, getting the state to pay as it should for county courts etc. PILOTs would fall into this category, though we neglected to include them at first. Our bad.

The reason we didn’t devote more airtime to the BHAGs is that all of those items would require changes in state law or bargained contracts to take effect. None of those changes could take place in time for March 19, when Nutter will introduce the budget plan we were discussing at the workshops.

But these long-range “drivers” of city spending and revenue generation do need to be thoroughly aired. We are talking with city officials about a future event this spring to do just that.

As some of the handouts circulated at the workshops showed, a little bit of knowledge about such complicated policy topics can be a dangerous thing. A lot of citizen energy was distracted into chasing fantasies and phantoms churned up by activists who insisted that certain easy fixes (which my colleague Dan Pohlig nicely characterized as “the gold bullion hidden under Nutter’s desk” theory) could eliminate all of the hard choices listed on the worksheets.

Sorry, folks, just ain’t so.

The people who insisted that Nutter administration officials were ignoring obvious and easy pots of gold at the end of shimmering rainbows never seemed to say to themselves: Look at someone as smart, with as many decades of experience with city budgets, as Finance Director Dubow. If Rob Dubow knew that some easy fix was available that would avoid the budget cuts that had thousands of people up in arms, don’t you think he would grab it and run with it?

Do you think he enjoys spending four evenings inside of two weeks being told by a parade of citizens that he’s an incompetent who’s ruining their city?

I’m not here to carry water for Nutter and his team. Administration officials have made plenty of mistakes in this long-running budget drama. Even in the run-up to these workshops, I had to wonder why they weren’t putting more big-number revenue items on the table for taxpayers to consider.

In the last two weeks, they surely got the message from citizens that they should look harder at the revenue side, inside of seeming to balance the budget only on the cost side.

But are they blithely ignoring free pots of gold so that they can fiendishly close health centers and lay off cops?

Somehow, I doubt that.

What happens next? Harris and I in the next few days will develop an executive summary of the results and main themes of the workshops.  It will be posted on this Web site at the same time it is sent to city officials. The plan is for us to brief Mayor Nutter on the workshop results Monday. The mayor will appear on WHYY’s Radio Times with Marty Moss Coane on Tuesday to let people know what he learned from the workshops and how he plans to use it. On Wednesday, Harris and I are to brief the mayor’s cabinet on the workshop results (which most of them have already reviewed on It’s Our City) during a special PhillyStat meeting.

Then we’ll see how the budget proposal shapes up. We will press the mayor — on behalf of all the citizens who gave of their time and energy to make the workshops a success — to tell his constituents several things:

* How he used the public input in his decision making.

* Which decisions were reshaped or even triggered by the public input.

* Why, in areas where his proposals diverge from the input, he made that choice.