Not too much locally but I came across this Associated Press dispatch from a Syracuse news source.
April 4, 2012, 7:10 p.m. EDT
AP
NEW YORK (AP) — New York is following Brazil by using a new way to spend public money: having communities decide what they need.
The results of a program called participatory budgeting were announced Wednesday by City Council members and community residents on the steps of City Hall. Residents of four districts in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens chose about two dozen projects costing millions of dollars. The projects included new fire department pagers, school technology upgrades and a food composting system.
Any district resident 18 or older, including non-U.S. citizens, could vote.
"This is an effort to reinvent government," said Josh Lerner, executive director of the New York-based Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit that supports such efforts in North America.
The approach, while it can be time-consuming, has succeeded in thousands of municipalities worldwide, including cities such as Chicago, Toronto, Berlin and Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it was pioneered in the late 1980s.
The bottom line, financially and socially, is that a New Yorker in a neighborhood involved in such budgeting helps make decisions that affect his or her daily life.
Alissa Wassung, a 30-year-old dancer who works for a nonprofit, lives in a bungalow by the ocean in Queens' Far Rockaway neighborhood. She jumped into the budget fray last fall, going to gatherings at which "I got to know all my neighbors, and I got to love this community," she said after the City Hall news conference.
Her area will get the firefighter pagers and a water pump to alleviate frequent flooding, plus a new gazebo and bandstand by the shorefront.
Four City Council members are spearheading New York's pilot effort: Republican Eric Ulrich and
Democrats Jumaane Williams, Melissa Mark-Viverito and Brad Lander.
They each have committed at least $1 million from their capital discretionary funds for "the people's budget" — as some have dubbed the process. However, those amounts could increase depending on how much money Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Democrat, allocates to members in the coming fiscal year.
A call for comment from The Associated Press to a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, was not immediately returned Wednesday.
Starting last October, people were mobilized for meetings by grassroots groups like the Community Voices Heard, with the politicians given a list of needs compiled by residents who voted in the past few weeks for the finalists.
Residents of Williams' district, which encompasses parts of Brooklyn, opted for new floodlighting in parks and security cameras on at-risk streets, among other things.
Elsewhere in the world, participatory communities also chose relatively modest, but basic, improvements representing a small slice of their capital budgets.
In Chicago, sidewalks got repaired.
In the Dominican Republic, schools were renewed and health centers were built.
And in the Republic of Congo's Kivu region, outdoor produce markets acquired public bathrooms and small bridges were constructed. The World Bank helped set up high-tech communications there so people in the countryside could participate.
"We sent SMS messages to invite them to attend meetings," said Tiago Peixoto, a Washington-based political scientist with the bank.
A mobile phone system also was set up in Kivu so votes could be registered remotely.
The global program has had an impact on how citizens relate to their democratic governments, said Gianpaolo Baiocchi, associate professor of sociology and international affairs at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
"You don't get the usual suspects involved — people in the neighborhood association or block clubs," Baiocchi said in a telephone interview. "People get involved in this because it's a tangible way to participate and make decisions on a project that affects them."
He said campaigns are under way to launch participatory budgeting in two California communities, Oakland and Vallejo, as well as New Orleans and Springfield, Mass.
Baiocchi, who authored a 2011 book titled "Bootstrapping Democracy," about 200 Brazilian municipalities with the program, said it has thrived in the world's poorer, least-served areas.
"This changes an environment," Peixoto concluded.
The results of a program called participatory budgeting were announced Wednesday by City Council members and community residents on the steps of City Hall. Residents of four districts in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens chose about two dozen projects costing millions of dollars. The projects included new fire department pagers, school technology upgrades and a food composting system.
Any district resident 18 or older, including non-U.S. citizens, could vote.
"This is an effort to reinvent government," said Josh Lerner, executive director of the New York-based Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit that supports such efforts in North America.
The approach, while it can be time-consuming, has succeeded in thousands of municipalities worldwide, including cities such as Chicago, Toronto, Berlin and Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it was pioneered in the late 1980s.
The bottom line, financially and socially, is that a New Yorker in a neighborhood involved in such budgeting helps make decisions that affect his or her daily life.
Alissa Wassung, a 30-year-old dancer who works for a nonprofit, lives in a bungalow by the ocean in Queens' Far Rockaway neighborhood. She jumped into the budget fray last fall, going to gatherings at which "I got to know all my neighbors, and I got to love this community," she said after the City Hall news conference.
Her area will get the firefighter pagers and a water pump to alleviate frequent flooding, plus a new gazebo and bandstand by the shorefront.
Four City Council members are spearheading New York's pilot effort: Republican Eric Ulrich and
Democrats Jumaane Williams, Melissa Mark-Viverito and Brad Lander.
They each have committed at least $1 million from their capital discretionary funds for "the people's budget" — as some have dubbed the process. However, those amounts could increase depending on how much money Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Democrat, allocates to members in the coming fiscal year.
A call for comment from The Associated Press to a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, was not immediately returned Wednesday.
Starting last October, people were mobilized for meetings by grassroots groups like the Community Voices Heard, with the politicians given a list of needs compiled by residents who voted in the past few weeks for the finalists.
Residents of Williams' district, which encompasses parts of Brooklyn, opted for new floodlighting in parks and security cameras on at-risk streets, among other things.
Elsewhere in the world, participatory communities also chose relatively modest, but basic, improvements representing a small slice of their capital budgets.
In Chicago, sidewalks got repaired.
In the Dominican Republic, schools were renewed and health centers were built.
And in the Republic of Congo's Kivu region, outdoor produce markets acquired public bathrooms and small bridges were constructed. The World Bank helped set up high-tech communications there so people in the countryside could participate.
"We sent SMS messages to invite them to attend meetings," said Tiago Peixoto, a Washington-based political scientist with the bank.
A mobile phone system also was set up in Kivu so votes could be registered remotely.
The global program has had an impact on how citizens relate to their democratic governments, said Gianpaolo Baiocchi, associate professor of sociology and international affairs at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
"You don't get the usual suspects involved — people in the neighborhood association or block clubs," Baiocchi said in a telephone interview. "People get involved in this because it's a tangible way to participate and make decisions on a project that affects them."
He said campaigns are under way to launch participatory budgeting in two California communities, Oakland and Vallejo, as well as New Orleans and Springfield, Mass.
Baiocchi, who authored a 2011 book titled "Bootstrapping Democracy," about 200 Brazilian municipalities with the program, said it has thrived in the world's poorer, least-served areas.
"This changes an environment," Peixoto concluded.
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