Community participation highly lacking in participatory budgeting program

 

Queens Eagle

There’s millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on the line – and a select few Queens residents are going to help decide how it gets spent.

With the new City Council in place, participatory budgeting season has begun. The process allows each councilmember to allocate money to project proposals voted on by residents of their district. The money must go to physical infrastructure projects that benefit the public, last for at least five years and cost $50,000 or more. Residents as young as 11 are eligible to vote.

However, councilmembers can choose whether or not they do participatory budgeting, and this year in Queens only a few neighborhoods will have the opportunity to participate.

Of the 15 councilmembers whose district is either entirely or partially in Queens, only three are doing participatory budgeting this year. They include Councilmembers Tiffany Cabán (Astoria, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Woodside), Adrienne Adams (Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Rochdale Village and South Ozone Park) and Jennifer Gutiérrez (Ridgewood, Bushwick and Williamsburg).

With the exception of Staten Island, where none of the borough’s three councilmembers are participating in the program, Queens has the lowest rate of participating members when compared to the other boroughs.

Though those doing participatory budgeting are in the minority in each borough, four of Manhattan’s 10 members are participating, four of the Bronx’s nine members are participating and 4 of Brooklyn’s 15 members are participating.

Participatory budgeting was suspended at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and councilmembers were slow to restart it last year, with only a handful from around the city participating.

The program, in its eleventh year, began informally in 2011, when then-Councilmembers Brad Lander, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Eric Ulrich and Jumaane Williams first started a voting process to dole out discretionary funds.

The program became more formalized in 2018 through a charter revision that tasked the city’s Civic Engagement Commission with expanding participatory budgeting citywide.

Prior to the pandemic, a majority of the council took advantage of the program. In 2019, 33 members participated – more than double the members that are participating this year.

Former City Councilmember Costa Constantinides, who served from 2014 until 2021, said community members would get excited over the program and launch campaigns to make sure their projects got the most votes.

One group, who was looking to clean up a dog park near the entrance to the RFK Bridge, made stickers and buttons to hand out to residents urging them to vote for the project. The project was a winner, and although many of those behind the campaign ended up moving, Constantinides said he was proud of their efforts.

“It’s not about them, it’s about the community,” he said.