'Participatory budgeting' pilot will allow community members to directly decide City spending
Sacramento is about to join at least a dozen other cities around the country in allowing residents to directly decide how to spend a portion of the City budget.
Credit: Participatory Budgeting Project
Members of the Sacramento City Council Tuesday endorsed a recommendation from the Measure U Advisory Committee that the City embark on a ‘participatory budgeting’ pilot project. The pilot will launch with funding to be approved on consent next week to hire an outside consulting firm for administration and outreach. The Council also voted last week to allocate $1 million for the process in the upcoming 2021 budget.
“We recognize this is a pilot of a million dollars,” said Debra Oto-Kent, chair of the Measure U subcommittee focused on the issue. “We have confidence that the impact we show through this pilot will be reflected in an increase in funding for this process.”
The Participatory Budgeting Project, an advocacy organization, says participatory budgeting began in Brazil and has spread all over Latin America. The group lists 22 cities in the United States that have have adopted some form of participatory budgeting. City staff said they were able to independently verify information from 11 of these cities, which is listed in the chart below.
The average amount allocated to participatory budgeting from the above examples is $7.41 per resident. If this amount were applied to the City’s population, the amount allocated would be approximately $3.8 million. On a budgetary basis, the average amount allocated to participatory budgeting from the above examples is 0.42% of the total budget. If this percentage were applied to the City’s combined General/Measure U Fund Budget, the amount allocated would be approximately $2.6 million. Learn more about participatory budgeting here.
