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This article speaks for itself
Submitted by Ray Murphy on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 11:55pm.
The headline is "Nutter scales back public input on budget." More at this link:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/85022142.html
Here's a preview:
This year, though, the Nutter administration has sharply curtailed citizen involvement in the budgeting process, though the fiscal challenges remain huge.
Nutter's 2009-10 budget address was preceded by five months of town-hall meetings, public workshops, news conferences, and open strategy sessions.
But the first public event on Nutter's schedule to highlight the 2010-11 budget was an address last week to the Chamber of Commerce.
Look for the quote from Stan.
Civic engagement is so last year!
It's no longer necessary. You see, unlike last year, we now realize that you can't get everything until you get to heaven.
wow. shocking.
what this tells me is that the mayor:
A) is a coward
B) is about to pull his authoritarian trick, again.
C) knows the next few months are gonna be UGLY!
D) is probably gonna do his "no libraries and no pools and no rec centers" trick again.
It is a damn shame that the city is in dire straits and that the first target is always the poor, the elderly, and children.
that's just rotten to the core. kind of like our mayor.
watch out kingsessing, here comes the devil again.
Why can't City Council hold town hall budget meetings?
Don't get me wrong: the mayor should take advantage of last year's precedent and should hold them himself.
But if he won't, why can't Council?
Let the mayor bring his boldest budget, Council their best ideas, and then meet with the rest of us to get our input and ideas.
Hell, they could assign the public problems to solve ahead of time, different ones for each meeting, and see if the public can't beat the professionals with their solutions.
If the mayor has decided that this is the year to get insular, then he's taking another step towards John Street-dom, and that sucks.
But that doesn't mean Council has to follow.
Council could open things up, but it won't
Council has its entrenched process for reviewing the mayor's budget proposal, and you'd think that it was mandated by the Constitution. They will have each Department come and parrot what the Mayor wants. They will provide no information that the Mayor doesn't want to provide, which means there will be endless hours of pointless back and forth between helpless mayoral puppets and frustrated, or in some cases, posturing, Council members. Then a few of them will go behind closed doors and cut the deal.
The public will be allowed to testify two times once near the start of the hearings, and once at the end. If any members of the public have a critique of the information that's been put forward by a Department head, and want to present it when Council members are actually paying attention to that Department, it will be too bad.
Two years ago, One Philadelphia asked that the process be amended to allow citizen testimony immediately following Department testimony. The response, though politely delivered, was basically "suck on it." And that's where things stand. If Council won't make the modest change that One Philly suggested, it will take a revolution to get them to go to the excellent framework that you suggested.