Tight Times, Tough Choices

The City Budget: Tight Times, Tough Choices, Citizen Priorities

Community Forums to Explore Closing the Budget Gap

The University of Pennsylvania Project for Civic Engagement is hosting a series of four community forums in various neighborhoods across the city. Called The City Budget: Tight Times, Tough Choices, Citizen Priorities, the forums are designed to be work sessions where Philadelphians will meet in small groups to work through some of the actual budget choices facing the city. Our goal is for participants to identify priorities and the trade-offs they are willing to make to reach those priorities. Mayor Nutter and city officials have agreed to consider input from the forums in developing the City's proposed budget for 2010.

Partner sites:

WHYY — "It's Our City"

Plan Philly

Citizen input from each forum

This section contains links to the Wailing Wall, videos of citizen testimonials, and moderator reports from each forum. The moderator reports are write-ups of the work done in the small breakout groups. The video testimonials are opportunities for citizens to speak for 2 minutes about topics close to their hearts. The Wailing Wall is a board where citizens can post complaints, concerns, or suggestions that they have regarding the current crisis or budget process.

St. Dominic's School (2/12/09)

Mastery Charter School (2/18/09)

St. Monica's Catholic School (2/19/09)

Pinn Memorial Baptist Church (2/23/09)

Brief summary of budget workshop results: The Bucket List

Here's how to understand the initial results of the four budget forums:

Participants were asked to review a list of more than 26 ways to close the city's nearly $200 million budget gap. (Here's a link to the worksheet).  Some cut costs, others raised revenues, by increasing existing fees, proposing new fees, or increasing taxes.

Then, in small groups, they deliberated on the choices, trying to reach 100 points (with each point roughly equal to $2 million). With the help of moderators from the PPCE, they sorted the actions into four buckets:

  1. The Low-Hanging Fruit: Actions that the group could agree on quickly. A 75 percent vote was needed to put something in this bucket.
  2. The No Way, No Hows: Actions the very thought of which made the group's blood run cold. Stuff they wanted off the table, post-haste and permanently. Again, a 75 percent vote was needed to stick something in that bucket. (Most groups found it much easier to fill this bucket than the others.)
  3. The Shared Pain: The actions people really didn't want to approve, but realized they would have to consider if they wanted to make it to 100 points. This is where the evenings' liveliest, most interesting discussions took place. An item could get put onto the Shared Pain list by a simple majority vote.
  4. The Gut Wrenchers: These were the really painful ideas that groups had rejected earlier, or avoided discussing all night, that ended up getting considered in the last-minute quest to get a decent number of points on the board.
  5. A fifth bucket, No Decisions, developed by default. These were actions the groups either never got around to reviewing, or discussed with no clear conclusion. For many groups, that ended up being the biggest bucket of all.

There were 53 different breakout groups across the four fourms, varying in size from a dozen to a hundred, did the work.  It was difficult work, and they did it in a variety of ways. While most groups were in the 35-60 point range, a few groups got nearly to 100 points, an amazing display of working through painful tradeoffs.

The chart at this link (pdf) lays out all the results.

Here's how it is organized:

In the first column, you'll see the action area, followed by the associated point totals. (For more detail on the options, see the full worksheet here (pdf)).

Second column: The number of groups that approved the item as Low Hanging Fruit. Some groups fiddled with the actions and point totals to reflect their values (this was encouraged). So in a lot of spots you'll see a breakdown of citizen-adjusted point values: e.g. 6 groups @ 3 points, 2 groups @ 6 points

Third column: The number of groups that declared this action a No Way No How, and stuck to its guns all night. (Some groups put an action here initially, but came back to it later as Shared Pain or a Gut Wrencher.

Fourth column: The number of groups that approved an action under Shared Pain. Here is where most of the fiddling with point values and actions occurred.

Fifth column: These are the Gut Wrenchers, the actions that no one really wanted to do and that may have been initially considered "No Way, No How" but which the group eventually agreed to. As you can see, not many groups wanted their guts to be wrenched.

Sixth column: The number of groups that either never discussed the item, or talked about it without reaching a firm conclusion.  Frequently, an item discussed by rejected as Low Hanging Fruit or No Way, No How ended up staying in that limbo for the rest of the evening, without being revived.

For a discussion of some of the initial themes, see Chris Satullo's discussion of the forums.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purpose of these events?

These events are designed to give Philadelphians a chance to learn up-to-date information about the city's fiscal condition, using it to help work through the urgent budget decisions facing the city. The idea is for citizens to weigh the real-world choices facing the city, and to give city officials guidance on how citizens would prefer to see them handled. This will be done in small working groups to encourage Philadelphians to work together, across neighborhoods, to suggest priorities for the city as a whole. Participants will be asked to arrive at a considered public judgment about what's best, not just for a given interest group or neighborhood, but for the whole city.

So what exactly will happen at these "Tight Times, Tough Choices" workshops?

First, citizens will get a briefing on the city's fiscal condition, and the work that went into developing the budget choices that they will discuss that night. The briefing will come in the form of a panel discussion, with top city officials such as Managing Director Camille Barnett, Finance Director Rob Dubow, and Budget Director Steve Agostini answering questions posed by WHYY journalists Tom Ferrick and Chris Satullo.

Then citizens will be divided into working breakout groups of roughly 20. There, working with trained moderators, they will review the budget choices facing the city, decide how they'd prefer to handle the tradeoffs involved, and explain why they made those choices.

The input from each breakout group will be recorded by the moderator, and reported to the Nutter administration within 24 hours.

Will the mayor be there?

No. The organizer of the event, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, thinks it would be most helpful if the focus of these workshops remains on citizen judgments about the budget choices facing the city. The goal is to try something different from the town meetings the mayor held late last year. To keep the focus on citizen views, it was suggested that the mayor not attend, but instead send his senior staff to give information and hear the citizens' input. Mayor Nutter agreed.

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What is the Penn Project for Civic Engagement and why is it in charge?

The Penn Project for Civic Engagement is based at the University of Pennsylvania. Its director and co-founder is Dr. Harris Sokoloff, who is one of the nation's leading experts in civic dialogue. The co-founder is Chris Satullo, formerly editorial page editor of The Inquirer and now executive director of news and civic dialogue at WHYY.

The PPCE was formally set up in 2006, but Sokoloff and Satullo have been leading civic dialogue projects around the region since 1996,including the Citizen Voices program and the Penn's Landing Forums. PPCE has led citizen dialogues for projects such as the Central Delaware Visioning Project (Penn Praxis), Great Expectations, the Kimmel Center re-envisioning, the City That Works forums, and the Big Canvas arts and culture project.

Based on that record of leading forums that produce meaningful citizen input, city officials asked PPCE a month ago if it would be willing to convene and lead citizen forums to get input on the city's 2009-10 budget.

Who can attend these events? Are they just for invited muckety-mucks?

Any Philadelphia taxpayer is welcome to attend. No advance registration is required, but here is an important point: While the venues are fairly large, space is still limited. You will need to sign in on the night of the event to be admitted, and seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the seats are gone, we may unfortunately have to turn people away. Registration will begin at 6 p.m. each night; try to get there as early as you can.

So how many tax dollars are being spent on these events to hear citizen ideas on how to save tax dollars?

None. The Tight Times, Tough Choices workshops are being funded by a grant from the William Penn Foundation.

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So what will be done with the results of these workshops? Will they make any difference?

City officials have promised to review the results and factor them into the proposed budget that Mayor Nutter will present to City Council in March. The PPCE has asked city officials to explain publicly just how they used the input in their decision making.

Will citizens get to review real budget data, or is this just a make-believe exercise?

Real data. City managers right now are developing lists of cost-cutting steps which they are supposed to submit to the Managing Director and the budget team by the end of the month. The city will relay information about the budget steps — whether cuts, layoffs, tax hikes, fee hikes — to the PPCE team in the first week of February. The PPCE team will distill those data into a set of sample budget options that citizens will be able to digest, review, and vote upon in the space of a two-hour forum.

What if I don't want to do a budget workshop with 20 people? What if I have a prepared statement, or just want to propose my ideas directly to city officials?

The goal of this event is to find out how citizens evaluate budget choices together. It is not to give individual activists an outlet to speak to large audiences. However, two outlets for expressions of individual opinion will be offered at each workshop, in addition to the breakout groups discussions. Citizens will have the option of posting short comments or proposals on a "wailing wall" set up at each event. Several videographers will be present at each event to take short, two-minute testimonies from citizens. All input received through these two methods will also be conveyed to city officials. Some of it will be posted on the WHYY web site.

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Why are there only four events? Why isn't there one in my neighborhood?

City officials could provide only a two-week window for these events - between the time city managers get done proposing budget steps and the time when final decisions have to be made on the proposed budget.

That window includes the Presidents' Day holiday weekend, further curtailing options.

Finally, such an event — with professional moderators hired to lead 10-12 breakout sessions a night — is expensive to mount. Four is the number of events that could be held comfortably inside the limits of time and money.

Obviously, such a schedule makes it impossible to hold a forum in every key neighborhood of the city. The goal was to find sites in the neighborhoods, not Center City, that could accommodate a large crowd and offer free parking and decent access to mass transit.

Who are these moderators and what is their role?

Moderators are neutral parties trained by the Penn Center for Civic Engagement in how to lead a focused, effective citizen conversation in which real work gets done, no one voice dominates, and everyone has a chance to be heard.

What if I can't make it to a forum?

City officials are looking at other vehicles for gathering citizen input, via the web and/or TV. You can follow the forums, including video, forums results, and reports by journalists, moderators and bloggers, at the It's Our City site on whyy.org, and It's Your Money, a Daily News blog on philly.com.

Where can I get budget information in advance of these events so that I can come prepared?

By Feb. 10, you will be able to see workshop materials in advance at www.whyy.org/city and at the PPCE Web site, www.gse.upenn.edu/ppce.

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