Hundreds of Slavic Village residents made their voices heard this weekend, selecting between 14 finalist ideas in a $100,000 pilot program from People’s Budget Cleveland using participatory budgeting.
More than 860 people narrowed down the finalists with ideas on how to better Slavic Village to just five.
Those five winning projects include:
- Clean Up So We Can See, a series of cleanups across the neighborhood
- a Vacant Property and Conditions Survey, which could line up messy lots for redevelopment
- funding for Neighborhood Pets, a pet pantry off East 65th St.
- First Tee scholarships to teach kids how to golf
- a new garden center on Fleet Ave.
The initiatives are tied to a pilot effort that People’s Budget, a nonprofit steeped in participatory budgeting theory, is using to try and win over Clevelanders. In 2023, an initiative that would’ve earmarked $14 million of the city’s general fund to be divvied up by Clevelanders by the same method failed by a super slim margin.
But PB CLE, as they’re known, is keen on its new experiment, which the next year’s build-out will show, they said.
“This pilot demonstrates what it looks like when residents have real power to make real decisions that impact their lives,” Cassie Park, co-manager People’s Budget pilot wrote Scene in a statement.
“We’ve been inspired as hundreds of Slavic Village residents have submitted ideas,” she said, “volunteered, and voted to bring this experiment in grassroots democracy to life.”
Last year, Slavic Village was chosen out of a handful of Cleveland neighborhoods to play host to PB CLE’s experiment.
That is, improve a neighborhood on the neighborhood’s terms.
Through PBCLE “I learned direct democracy gets literally everyone involved, and that can bring a wide diversity of passion and energy to the community,” said Chuck Gliha, Slavic Village resident. A pilot, he said, that should be “happening in every neighborhood, all over the city, every year.”
But whether that means convincing the whole city again is a lot harder to discern.
Voters struck down Issue 38, the participatory budgeting initiative, by just one percentage point. Ward 4 Councilman Kris Harsh emerged as the issue’s main opposition, even going as far as poking holes in the idea during a packed-room debate at Public Hall.
Mayor Justin Bibb and the bulk of City Council soon opposed the idea of 11 people controlling two percent of the city’s operating budget. Why, they asked, should Clevelanders elect a body to decide how taxpayers’ money is spent when we already have one?
“It’s kind of disingenuous, dangerous and misleading,” Council President Blaine Griffin said at the time, “for a group of people to promote themselves as the only group of people that has a relationship and intimate and unique understanding of the needs of our community.”
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 cobbled 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 of neighbors—rasies questions about the aspirations of true democracy underlying participatory budgeting. Projects in other cities weren’t far off: two percent of neighbors showed up to vote in one in Cambridge, Mass.; another one, in Chicago, just one percent.
And Sunday’s final vote count of 861 represents only four percent of Slavic Village as a whole.
So, will PBCLE be aiming for the ballot box any time soon?
“Unfortunately I can’t answer that,” a spokesperson for PBCLE told Scene in a phone call. “We don’t have plans yet, but PBCLE’s not going away. We do expect to grow the pilot” in the next few years.
“I think we’ve demonstrated with its success the ability to gain more supporters who haven’t supported us in the past,” they added. “And I do think that goes up to the city level.”
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
