During the last city council race, candidate Nick Weiland suggested that the city implement participatory budgeting. It’s not a new concept, but something that has evolved over the years thru technology.
When Councilor Stehly attended the NLC’s conference a few years ago, she also was introduced to the concept.
We don’t have it in Sioux Falls, in fact, we don’t even have anything that comes close.
I have been following city budgets for the past 13 years, all I have ever seen is a massive growth in government and fewer services for that growth. I believe if citizens were engaged from the get go, those budgets would shrink and we would get more bang and more services (that actually help people) for the buck. Instead we allow city employees shape the budget, and hand it over to the mayor, in which he hands off to the council and us citizens get about 20 minutes for input. It’s disgusting.
First off, according to Charter, the city council should be forming the budget from input from city directors AND citizens. This should be a 12 month, all-year process. Instead they take very little input from citizens, pack it full of non-profit and corporate welfare giveaways, and leave us with a half-mile bike trail expansion and a cement Ping-Pong table.
One reason I didn’t show up last night is because by that time it was too late, the budget was most likely formed MONTHS ago behind closed doors in the mayor’s office. My five minutes don’t mean squat.
But let’s look at the explosive nature of our budget. In 2016 our budget was $471 Million, this year it is $545 Million, a 15% increase in 4 years. Has your wages increased that much? What about your cost of living? In an essence, if you were making $40K in 2016, your wages would be $46K in 2020, a $1,500 raise each year for 4 years. Has that happened in your life? Highly unlikely.
Until the city council (our true representatives of citizens) and the citizens actually have year-long input into the budget, all it represents is growing government for the mayor’s corporate trough friends.
Just look at the people defending the mayor’s mis-communication about citywide cleanup, saying things like, “It’s our personal responsibility” to clean up the city. In some respects I agree with the good pastor who said that, but we all pay taxes collectively so that we have services that we collectively receive and can’t manage to take care of on our own, you know, like educating the masses, building roads and infrastructure, or taking 100 FT tall trees off of our house with a giant tractor/loader.
Not only do we no longer have a say in how our taxes are being spent, we are no longer getting much in return for those high taxes.