Crock the Vote NYC
Participatory budgeting’s a sham
OVER the weekend, New Yorkers finished voting in “participatory budgeting,” a way to invite residents to decide each year how to spend $1 million or so of their taxpayer money.
“Fake democracy” might be a better term, though. The process creates the illusion of good government rather than the reality of good government.
It started in the Third World in the late 1980s as a way to help poor people with no democratic experience navigate the new world that emerged when Cold War dictatorships ended.
The first project was in 1989 in a poor region of Brazil, less than half a decade after that country had shaken off 21 years of brutal military rule. The idea was to coax people living in the slums of Porto Alegre, with no functional local government, to trust the democratic process by voting for basic services.
It worked: In 1989, only 75 percent of Porto Alegre’s householders had water and sewer connections. But by 1998, after poor slumdwellers made it clear that they wanted more of the city budget devoted to this investment, the figure rose to 98 percent, according to the World Bank.
New York shook off military rule in 1783, but it didn’t get participatory budgeting until 2011. Four City Council members decided that they would hold a months-long public process so that the people in their districts (over the age of 14) could vote on how to spend at least $1 million of each district’s annual capital budget.
This year, 33 of the City Council’s 51 districts are, er, participating. And though people think of it as a progressive idea, one of participatory budgeting’s original sponsors was Councilman Eric Ulrich, a Queens Republican.
Attend a participatory-budgeting meeting, and you’ll think you’re in a model of direct democracy. Council staff and volunteers explain a little bit about how the budget works: things like the difference between the operating budget (for day-to-day needs like paying teachers) and the capital budget (for building a school).
You can meet your neighbors and discuss the merits of voting for a park vs. an air-conditioning system.
But overall, the exercise points out the city’s failure to spend money wisely, to an absurd degree.
To pick on one district, Corey Johnson’s on Manhattan’s West Side (which happens to be my own): Why should voters have to choose between spending $150,000 to “upgrade [an] electrical panel and two new quad outlets ... which would minimize overloading of the current outlets” in a public school, and spending $300,000 to “provide [handicapped] accessibility to toilet facilities in the Hudson Park Library?”
Really: The city government is asking teenagers to choose between whether they’d rather run the risk of fire in a school, or keep people in wheelchairs from using the bathroom. (You can pick five of 15 different budgetary choices, but
someone has to lose.) And why offer the state-run MTA $125,000 of city money for countdown clocks at bus stops — something the MTA ought to do on its own?
Participants in four separate Brooklyn districts would like vot- ers to consider resurfacing roads, including those with “major cracks” and “potholes.” Well, sure. But can’t city officials think of that on their own, without citizens taking time out of their busy lives to supervise them?
Participatory budgeting teaches young and old alike that, hey, the city must need more money. If we can’t afford safe electrical outlets in schools and paved roads, we probably aren’t taxing people enough.
But the voters participating don’t have all the information.
For example, these voters don’t see that the city will spend $10.3 billion next year on city-worker “fringe” benefits, mostly health benefits, so that city workers don’t have to pay any of their own medical-insurance costs. That would pay for a lot of bathrooms.
Some brave City Council members should fix participatory budgeting by expanding it — by asking participants to vote, in an advisory role only, on the city’s union contracts, pension benefits and health benefits. It’s their money, after all.
Participatory voters should also get to decide if Mayor de Blasio re
ally needed to double the staff in the Education Department’s Central Administration office, at an extra cost of $7.3 million, as The Post reported.
But that may be taking democracy too far for our elected officials. For now, voters in northern Brooklyn, for example, can keep deciding if they’d rather “repair broken sidewalks” or “provide updated wiring in classrooms.”