People's Budget Cleveland Group to Launch $100,000 Participatory Budget Pilot Program

Organizers of People’s Budget CLE, shown here in front of City Hall in 2023, canvassed the city to get Issue 38, an amendment that would give Clevelanders access a small slice of the city’s spending, on the November ballot that year. It failed, despite 30,000 voting in support. Credit: Maria Elena Scott

People’s Budget Cleveland, the team of advocates that believe Clevelanders should have a greater say in how their tax money is spent and got a participatory budgeting ballot issue before voters in 2023, is giving their efforts another go with a pilot program.

Starting in May, PB CLE will begin six months of research and listening for a $100,000, privately funded version of their idea in one Cleveland neighborhood. (That neighborhood has yet to be selected.)

The bid in November 2023 to direct $14 million of Cleveland’s coffers to a People’s Budget Fund failed by a slim margin, of just 1,387 votes.

A year of regrouping has seemed to led to renewed faith: Clevelanders want greater say in how their dollars are spent on public projects.

“We saw the election as not everything we wanted. And we also saw it as an affirmation, that a substantial number of people in Cleveland want a democratic way of making decisions—real decisions. And we want to see that goal in Cleveland. The pilot is a way of doing that,” PB CLE’s Jonathan Welle told Scene.

With federal funding cuts, Clevelanders will see a handful of projects tabled or delayed. The pilot program will be a chance to give one neighborhood a shot at, well, calling their own shots.

“This work is even more important now, at the time of rising authoritarianism,” PB CLE’s website reads, “because a People’s Budget harnesses the collective wisdom of Cleveland residents and builds neighborhood power.”

A program manager, to be hired this month, will help spearhead idea gathering. Clevelanders can have their say on the best candidate through a questionnaire that wraps up April 15.

There’s no denying that $100,000 doesn’t compare to City Hall’s meaty, $172 million, three-year budget for capital projects, for public pool rehabs, new football stadiums and Irishtown Bend Park. Or the $14 million slice a steering committee could’ve wrangled if Issue 38 had passed.

But that hasn’t stopped the group completely.

“People want to see school projects, beautification projects and safety projects,” Andrea White, a PB CLE committee member, told Signal. “They want to see an uplift of their neighborhoods because they do not see that at this present moment. This pilot can change that.”

Residents voting on how to spend pooled money exists in some form—a county government, a school—in over 7,000 cities throughout the world, the Participatory Budgeting Project found.

In 2018, We Decide Detroit helped cobble together $250,000 to spend in and around Clark Park, situated in a Hispanic-majority neighborhood. Months later, after focus groups and votes casted, neighbors made up their minds on how to spend it: $72,000 for outdoor music; $50,000 to fix up Clark’s ragged gazebo; and $139,000 to build a small, ADA-accessible playground for children.

Yet, the neighborhood’s somewhat paltry voter turnout—just nine percent neighbors—rasies questions about the aspirations of true democracy underlying participatory budgeting. And projects in other cities weren’t too far off: just two percent of neighbors showed up to vote in one in Cambridge, Mass.; another one, in Chicago, just one percent.

Any recommendations, in the Clark Park case, hinted at actually consulting City Hall rather than shunning local politicians altogether.

“Involve the city sooner,” a follow-up report on the project read. “Involve a highly trusted elected official known for their grassroots connections earlier in the process.”

PB CLE is slated to host a kickoff event sometime in May.