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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.Engagement is not a one-time thing
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 6:13 pm - by Chris Satullo. Filed under: Budget.
Crowd gathers at a recent citizen budget workshop in Philadelphia
Harris Sokoloff, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Project for Civic Engagement, planned and led the recent citizen budget workshops in Philadelphia (which WHYY co-sponsored). He writes for It’s Our City about how Mayor Nutter’s budget proposal connects (or doesn’t) to the input at the workshops, and about what should happen going forward to maintain the civic engagement momentum around budget issues.
Harris Sokoloff
By Harris Sokoloff
Michael Nutter has taken to calling his fiscal plan for next year “The People’s Budget.”
Others have taken to mocking or questioning that claim. Indeed, rarely has a “people’s budget” asked this much sacrifice of the people. But in the mayor’s defense, the budget is based on an unusual public engagement process.
More than 1,700 taxpayers participated in the four budget workshops called The City Budget: Tight Times, Tough Choices conducted by my organization, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, in partnership with WHYY.
Other engagement included a survey of 1,600 Philadelphians by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the mayor’s own informal conversations with taxpayers in churches, synagogues, barbershops, and in people’s kitchens, living rooms and basements. Taken together, more than 5,000 taxpayers have been engaged in one way or another so far for the 2010 budget.
Whether or not this amounts to “unprecedented” public engagement, as the administration claims, is up to others to determine.
What I can say is that this level of outreach poses a challenge for both the Mayor and the taxpayers who participated in the Tight Times, Tough Choices workshops.
True public engagement is not a one-time thing. It is not an end in itself and should not be just an item to be checked off a political “to do” list. Rather, it should kick-start an ongoing two-way conversation between the city government and its taxpayers.
The challenge for the Mayor is to make it clear how what he proposes and decides about taxes and services really responds to what he’s heard taxpayers say in deliberative workshops.
Over and over taxpayers asked if their work at the budget workshops would be respected: Would it make a difference? Would the Mayor and city government (including City Council) listen and use the work they did?
Over the last two weeks, we heard the Mayor’s answers to these questions. Over and over, he’s told us how he understood what he heard and what he’s doing with what he understood. He’s told us which ideas he’s turned into action. And on more than one occasion, he’s told us why he hasn’t acted on citizens’ advice.
When Nutter announced he’d cut 243 city vehicles, he said, “Citizens want us to reduce the size of the city’s fleet, and I’m here to say today, ‘I heard you.’” And when he rolled out the full budget to Council last week, the mayor said “We’ve heard the public” about protecting the jobs of patrol officers and firefighters. “I refuse to do anything that halts our march toward a safer city,” the mayor said.
The major finding of the workshops was the willingness of many citizens to pay more in taxes to protect services. The Mayor has said that surprised him, but that he heard the message and has made decisions accordingly.
Up to a point. His budget proposes raising taxes, but not the one most citizens favored hiking, the wage tax. In choosing to maintain the wage tax rate, while seeking hikes in property and sales taxes, Nutter at least did citizens the courtesy of explaining why he was ignoring their preference: Raising wage taxes, he argued, “would severely damage our ability to save and create jobs and this is the last thing we should be thinking about in the kind of economic crisis we’re facing.” He also said, “Raising the wage tax to fix our deficit is the poster child for taking a short-term step with devastating long-term impact. It sends the wrong message. It’s the wrong thing to do and I won’t do it.”
Given what we heard at the budget workshops, this will be a hard tax for taxpayers to swallow! The Mayor’s proposal suggests a larger increase than any of the groups at the budget workshops even considered.
But he did show he heard one frequently mentioned concern at the workshops when he said he was worried “about the impact of these proposals on our low-income workers and senior citizens. So, we must take action to protect them as well.”
So, it seems fair to credit the Mayor with continuing the conversation, if somewhat pugnaciously. He has demonstrated that he was serious when he said he’d listen to what came out of the PPCE’s budget workshops.
In these ways the Mayor met a significant challenge in presenting the budget.
Taxpayers have parallel and reciprocal challenges: to acknowledge the hard work involved in balancing the budget in these precarious times and, second, to keep the conversation going and focused on the goals and values that emerged in the budget workshops.
It would be easy, but wrong, for taxpayers to respond to the Mayor’s budget proposal by picking out only the items with which they disagree. Anger and outrage are easy habits to fall into. We’re practiced in that, as was evidenced when the mayor announced cuts to the library system in balancing the 2009 budget. That response also dishonors the hard work taxpayers did in the budget workshops.
It would be easy for taxpayers to focus on specific cuts they may not like. Or on specific tax increases they think unfair. But we can no longer take the easy way out.
Participant after participant in the budget workshops commented that the work they were asked to do there was more difficult than they imagined, that they had to consider costs and benefits and trade-offs they didn’t really want to face. Some said our phrase “gut wrencher” for the final category of hard calls was an accurate one.
In responding to the Mayor’s budget proposal, taxpayers should stay focused on the goals, values and concerns that emerged from the Tight Times, Tough Choices workshops. And we should not be reluctant to notice the places where the Mayor and his team actually addressed the goals and values that emerged from the workshops.
Still, their plan may miss the mark in significant ways. When that seems to us to be the case, let’s not ask, “How could they be so dumb, crass or evil?” Let’s ask, “If not this, then how do we balance the budget while holding on to our vision for a better Philadelphia?”
How can we close the budget gap while protecting the most vulnerable? How can we balance safety and protection? How can we raise revenue without chasing away businesses or residents?
We should also take up the Mayor’s challenges to volunteer at libraries and recreation centers, to help run afterschool and summer programs and to make sure children use them, and to take advantage of the business services the city offers.
The challenge for taxpayers is to keep engaged in the work. We should acknowledge the difficult decisions they have made and then ask the tough questions that support the goals and values that emerged from the workshops.
These are new times, requiring new actions and responses of our leaders and of ourselves as taxpayers. We’ll have to wait to see if we are up to that challenge.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:08 am
This propaganda machine, “my organization, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement”, used a classic bait and switch tactic (Mayor’s meetings where the Mayor is asked not to show up) to coral a small segment of the city’s citizenry to help legitimize big business efforts to escape the consequences of their profit mongering.
Government agencies from the local to the national are scrambling to preserve the systematic oppression of working people that has created the present crisis. Real leadership to exploit the vast capital resources hoarded by the super rich gets no discussion time. Our resources are being used to prop up the most corrupt oligarchy ever and we’re suppose to volunteer so the monies that would pay for services such as libraries, recreation centers, after-school and summer programs can be used to further enrich the super rich. NO.
We are not deceived. The mayor’s tax scheme is patently regressive and unacceptable to the vast majority of the citizenry. Your defense of his tactics is reprehensible and an embarrassment to the ethic of academic pursuit of truth. Shame. Peddle your tribe somewhere else, we demand truth.
The challenge for our society is to define social responsibility in the context of justice. We will accept nothing less. The banks and industrialists have had their party, now its time for them to pay the bill. Because they squandered it and can not our only option is to assume ownership and apply fiscal discipline that reflects the people’s interests.
You may call that despotic. To the exploiters the justice of the oppressed will always appear dictatorial. Your time is past.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:44 am
The City of Philadelphia could have taken steps long ago to prevent all of its current budgetary problems. What successive mayors and city councils have failed to grasp is that it is critically important how government raises its revenue. Taxing everything and every activity and every transaction has a serious detrimental impact on the health of any community.
Doing what ought to be done requires a good deal of courage to break from entrenched practices that have failed but benefited the most politically influential at the expense of the general community.
Tax revenue pays for public goods and services, and public goods and services are the source of rising land values. Publicly created, land values OUGHT to be the primary source of public revenue. Failing to collect this revenue puts huge gains in land value in private pockets and then requires government to tax what people earn by producing goods and serves in order to provide for police and fire protection, for education, for libraries, for recreation, and other public services.
Thus, the starting point for solving the problem is to increase the rate of taxtion on assessed land values to a level that collects what economics describes as the “location rental value.” At the same time, property improvements should be exempted from the tax base.
What the above measure will do is very quickly eliminate the financial rewards for speculating in locations and raise the cost of holding land off the market. The incentive will be for landowners to bring the land they hold to its highest, best use in the market.
What about wage taxes? In the long run, we ought to stop penalizing people for income they earn producing goods or providing services. However, for a long time now those who have enjoyed the highest incomes (regardless of how obtained) have had an easy ride from government. The city ought to adopt a progressive income tax, exempting all individual incomes up to, say, the city median income, then apply increasing rates of taxation to higher ranges of income — no other deductions or exemptions. This would combine simplicity with progressivity, generating revenue from those who have the greatest ability to pay.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:03 am
The city still has not addressed the fact that we have far more city employees now then we did when there were 2 million or more citizens. Why is that? And are our services any better for it? I sincerely doubt it.
While the Mayor proposes the budget, the City Council must act on it. The same City Council members who won’t cut their own staffs, won’t give up their cars, won’t give up pretty much anything.
I submit that neither the Mayor nor City Council is listening to the citizens of this great city.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Michele - While I can appreciate your frustration, it’s not factually accurate to say the city has not reduced its workforce since it had 2 million people.
Ed Rendell cut 1,400 jobs.
Since 2000, according to a new Pew report on the state of the city, the number of workers in the city’s “central bureaucracy” (Pew’s term) has dropped 11 percent, while workers engaged in “direct neighborhood services” has dropped 14 percent. Public safety and human services have seen much smaller percentage drops, but numbers there are down, not up, over the last eight years. And those figures don’t reflect any cuts made by Nutter as a result of the current crisis.
The huge driver of expense in the city budget is benefits for employees, health and pension costs. They have gone way up The city now has more retired workers on pensions than it has active employees. That is an untenable place to be.
The benefit cost per employee has doubled in this decade; benefits now eat fully one quarter of every dollar the city takes in from taxes.
Chris Satullo
April 14th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Chris,
I haven’t dug into the details of the proposed budget, however, I haven’t heard any discussion of the future status of city-owned golf venues. I would find it hard to believe that they all pay for themselves profitably. I’m sure a developer would love to get their hands on one or more of the land parcels.
April 20th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Whenever there is ‘financial crisis’ the politicians (Nutter and Rendell) run around the city, with their Town Meetings, and TV posturing, etc. to solicit ‘the help’ and listen to the citizenry. That’s a mockery. Their purpose is to make you feel they are sincere in trying to solve the crisis. They make it appear they are turning TO you, but are in affect, turning ON you to make the sacrifices.
They cut the services (libraries, pools, etc,) that make your life bearable living in a big city. At the same time their tremendously expensive pet projects go untouched. The particular offense I refer to is moving the BARNES FOUNDATION from Merion to the Parkway, primarily as a plum in their bonnet. This is an art school, left to Merion and the world by Albert Barnes, that now houses an art collection valued at 30 to 60 billion dollars. They are salivating over that prize.That’s what they are trying to steal. Here and in the international press, it has been called. “The biggest art heist in American history.” Through horrendous legal machinations, they have manipulated to move the BARNES, which is a mere five miles away, at a cost that will easily reach 500 million dollars: much of it taxpayer’s money.
In league with the three so called philanthropic foundations, Pew, Annenberg and Lenfest, (who are big Rendell donors), they will be spending YOUR money, and divert millions from essential services.
Your forum quotes Pew reports: don’t believe them, they are one of the major cohorts.
Talk about major boondoggles and a waste of money, this is the greatest ‘pulling the wool over your eyes’ ever.
On top of that, the city has given the land for the proposed Barnes for only One Dollar, where a viable enterprise built there could bring in millions in tax revenue.
Ironically, every taxpayer in the state will be paying for a strictly Philadelphia project. Everyone must
speak up to stop this kind of insanity. It’s your money!!