Few members of the City Council are more devoted to transparency and inclusive democracy than Alderman Joe Moore. Want proof? He’s put his gritty, diverse 49th Ward on the map as the first—and, so far, only—community in the U.S. to practice participatory budgeting.
In spring 2009, on the advice of the Brown University-based nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, Moore had invited Rogers Park leaders to join a steering committee. “Block clubs, churches, schools, mosques, you name it” were included, he says. “Working out of my office, they came up with a process for community residents to come together and decide on projects they wanted to propose to the voters.”
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That process called for a series of neighborhood brainstorming sessions, held last fall, and the formation of six subcommittees consisting of any locals interested enough to join. The plan to paint murals on the ward’s grungy underpasses came out of the Art and Other Projects committee, headed by Partridge, which considered it a natural fit for a community already creating a “Mile of Murals” along the CTA tracks on Glenwood Avenue as part of an effort to turn itself into an arts destination. The proposal joined 35 others in balloting conducted at two sites and open to all 49th Ward residents “regardless of citizenship or voter registration status,” as long as they were at least 16 years old. Voters could select up to eight initiatives apiece.
Moore says that asking the public to choose among 200 possibilities would have been “inundating them with information. There’s no way that you can ask every voter to wade through 200, so we needed to have some sort of vetting process and that’s the process we came up with.” But offering only 24 alternatives for 12 slots while touting the huge response raised the question, What did the other 180 or so submissions look like?
Everyone I spoke with says the contest was a learning experience, and that there’ll be improvements if they get a crack at something like it next year. “Public funds available for public deliberation is what appealed to me,” says Partridge, who would like to see the concept expanded and reconfigured on the model of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration—though she’s aware that menu money can only be used for infrastructure improvements.
And then there’s the matter of whether what the public chooses is necessarily the wisest choice. According to De La Rosa, the committee was thinking the murals would have a life span of about seven years and then be replaced by something fresh. If that’s the case, taxpayers will be paying interest on the $84,000 cost of the project long after these murals have disappeared, since the menu money comes from 30-year general obligation bonds issued by the city.
