City Council members on Wednesday voted down amendments to Mayor Michelle Wu’s plans to give residents a say in spending taxpayer dollars.
Councilors drafted amendments to the Mayor’s participatory budgeting directive Tuesday, but the updates failed to pass after six councilors voted in favor, four voted against and three were absent. Seven members are required to constitute a majority vote, according to City Council rule 28.
“Participatory budgeting passed at the ballot box, and participatory budgeting will be implemented,” Councilor Michael Flaherty said. “It’s just a matter of which version do you want?”
The Mayor’s plan establishes an Office of Participatory Budgeting and citizen oversight board that will enable residents to make budget recommendations starting in 2024.
City Council’s proposed amendments included paying Bostonians to join the oversight board and increasing the number of seats on it.
Mayor Wu’s original directive will start implementing Friday, without the council’s changes.
Councilor Ricardo Arroyo said the proposed measures were meant to encourage board-membership applications from a pool of citizens that accurately reflect Boston’s population.
“All of those things just increase the amount of inclusivity of voice and diversity of voice,” Arroyo said after the meeting. “Those were the edits that were voted against today.”
The council’s updated plan stated that the Mayor should prioritize selecting board members from “historically underserved communities especially formerly incarcerated people, youth (ages 16-25), working class people of color, and first or second generation immigrants,” according to the amended document.
Councilor Frank Baker, who voted no on the amendments, said he was opposed to the original referendum on participatory budgeting and expressed concern about residents making budget decisions without experience in city government.
“The power should stay with us,” Baker said during the meeting. “If the advocates want [a seat] at the budget table, they should put their name on the ballot and run.”
Councilor Kendra Lara voted in favor of the updates and said participatory budgeting has proven “incredibly, incredibly successful” in other cities and is a way “to nurture a more direct democracy” in Boston.
A study on citizen-guided budgeting in North America, conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, found that participatory budgeting processes can build civic engagement and uncover the needs of underserved communities.
However, if not designed carefully, these processes are also at risk of being co-opted by politicians, looking to performatively point to an interest in these communities and then ignore their input. There’s also the possibility of already-privileged groups claiming funding for wealthy neighborhoods.
Councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy voted against the changes and said they weren’t “comfortable” supporting the updated legislation since they were handed a copy of it minutes before being called to vote.
“In theory, I support the concept of a participatory budget,” Flynn said. “But as we continue to move from our recovery from a three-year pandemic, in these uncertain economic times, now might not be the time to experiment with taxpayer money on a proposal with many unanswered questions.”
The amended budgeting process was one vote short of passing during the Wednesday meeting, but Arroyo said afterwards that two councilors of the three absent have indicated support for the diversity-focused changes and may help them become enshrined into law later on.
“It was going to pass, it had a majority vote,” Arroyo said. “[It] simply did not have enough councilors on the floor today.”
