Your MesaZona blogger has been going on and on for days now in multiple posts about ghe City of Mesa budgets for FY2015/16 and FY2016/17. The reason?
Very few members of the public ever comment at meetings - they are simple not engaged or choose not to participate in our democracy. Admittedly it takes time and considerable effort to even find out what's on the agendas . . . people are frequently boggled - or even understand - budget terms or bother to find out about slick-and-quick proposals.
Exactly why and what this article from Next City has to say [extracts only here/read original]
Participatory Budgeting Reaches Historically Disenfranchised Neighbors
“Does anybody know why this process is so important? . . . Participatory budgeting allows communities to have a direct say in how resources get deployed in their own neighborhoods. From 2014 to 2015, more than 70,000 residents in 46 jurisdictions across the United States and Canada directly decided how their cities and districts should spend nearly $50 million in public funds through participatory budgeting.
[Blogger's Note: some of the same questions asked on this blog]
Does anybody know what capital budget means?”
. . . It’s an important concept, . . and Oscar Abello hits it right on the head
to begin to re-establish a culture of democracy and citizenship among their constituents, especially with constituents that have historically been disenfranchised from the political process.
READ THAT AGAIN
“We found a correlation between doing outreach with community-based organizations and increased participation of low-income and people of color at the vote,” says Carolin Hagelskamp, one of the report co-authors. In many cases, she says, engaging community-based organizations often starts with inviting them to be part of the jurisdiction-wide steering committee.
“A lot really starts with who is in that steering committee,” says Hagelskamp. “For the most part it’s the steering committee that sets the goals and the rules and also monitors throughout how things are going and are they achieving their goals.”
Person-to-person outreach also helps bring out historically disenfranchised groups. “Talking to people on the street, coffee shops, fast food restaurants, laundromats, barbershops, churches, community centers, street corners, schools, wherever people hang out a little bit,” Hagelskamp adds.
The trend lines are looking up. Jurisdictions that started out doing well when it comes to low-income voter turnout or black voter turnout are keeping up their performance along those lines, while jurisdictions that weren’t doing well are learning from others and improving their performance. . .
Hispanic or Latino outreach remains a weak point, however. Sixty-eight percent of communities under-represented their census level of Hispanic or Latino populations when it came to voter demographics in participatory budgeting.
Another upcoming project: indicators to determine who is really benefiting from any given participatory budgeting project. “We’re working on equity indicators for each of the projects that win, looking for who are they serving,” Hagelskamp says.
But perhaps the most important impact, that cultivating of democracy and citizenship, remains something that can’t be captured by any indicator. “Some people call it participatory budgeting becoming institutionalized, or say participatory budgeting is building civic infrastructure,” says Hagelskamp. “Officials use it to learn about their communities, and residents are starting to learn how they can use the process to advocate or voice opinions about certain things, even if they don’t get funded.”
