The Final Report from the citizen workshops has been delivered to the mayor

By Chris Satullo

This morning, Harris Sokoloff and I delivered our final report on the yield from the four Tight Times, Tough Choices budget workshops to Mayor Michael Nutter and his cabinet.

We spent about an hour going over the input and the findings from this exercise in asking more than 1,700 residents of the city to think through the hard trade-offs forced by a city budget for 2010 that’s projected to be nearly $200 million in the red.

To read the report, click HERE. (pdf)

The mayor will give his first reactions to the input on tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) Radio Times show with Marty Moss-Coane, at 10 a.m.   Listen in on FM-91.  If you miss it live, you can still listen to the broadcast any time at whyy.org.

Harris, who is director and co-founder of the organization that ran the workshops (the Penn Project on Civic Engagement) and I will repeat our presentation at 3 p.m. Wednesday, for a televised PhillyStat meeting to which members of Council have been invited. PhillyStat meetings can be seen on cable Channel 64 for those who live in the city; they are also available for viewing on the city Web site.

At today’s meeting, Harris and I stressed to the Mayor how important we thought it was for him to respond to the key concerns and suggestions that arose from the workshops when he presents his budget to City Council on March 19. We urged him to tell citizens who gave of their time and talent to attend just how he used their input, where it clarified or changed his thinking, and how he thinks the choices he made respond to the input.   Where he felt compelled to do something contrary to the majority input, we urged him to explain why, in terms of the values citizens brought to the issues.

The mayor and other Cabinet members asked plenty of questions, trying to understand the input and to get a sense of how firm a grasp citizens had of some of the factors that limit the city’s options (e.g. how state law makes it harder than it used to be to extract payment in lieu of taxes from large, tax-exempt operations such as the University of Pennsylvania.)

The mayor probed especially hard on what the input had been around the idea of raising the wage tax to protect services, an idea which two/thirds of the breakout groups at the four forums supported in some form.

We welcome your comments on the report below.  If you want to look over all the raw input on which the report is based, it’s all here on It’s Our City: moderator reports on the 53 breakout groups, all the video testimonies, and all the comments posted on the “wailing wall” that was set up at the event.

Chris Satullo