Q&A for Community Budget Workshops

Tight Times, Tough Choices: Q&A

Q. What is the purpose of these events?

A. 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.
 
Q. So what exactly will happen at these “Tight Times, Tough Choices” workshops?

A. 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 trade-offs 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.

Q. Will the mayor be there?

A. 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 citizens’ input. Mayor Nutter agreed.

Q. What is this Penn Project for Civic Engagement and why is it in charge?

A. 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.  

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

A. Any Philadelphia taxpayer is welcome to attend.  No advance registration is required, but here is an important point: Although 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-serve 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.

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

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

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

A. 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.

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

A. Real data.  City managers right now are developing lists of cost-cutting steps that 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 that 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.

Q. 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?

A. 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-group 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 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.org Web site.

Q. Why are there only four events? Why isn’t there one in my neighborhood?

A. 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, provide free parking, and offer decent access to mass transit.

Q. Who are these moderators and what is their role?

A. 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.  

Q. What if I can’t make it to a forum?

A. 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.

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

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