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Community Input Process

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Toni Shope asked

19 Aug 2010

Has your organization undertaken a community input process on how your City/County can best address the downturn in the economy and the resulting impact on the budget? If so, please share process and lessons learned. Thank you.

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Michael Repas said

23 Aug 2010

Hi Toni:

In looking for some examples for you, I have found some interesting possibilities worth considering:

-In the state of Oregon, there is a clear policy for citizen participation in the budget process in general, one that has bearing on the specifics of your question. Within the outlining of this process, there are multiple instances of “Citizens can expect the opportunity to do an action.” This culminates in the line explaining that “The citizens of a district have the opportunity and the responsibility to be involved in the process. It is more efficient to the overall system when citizens become involved in the development of the budget itself, rather than mounting a legal challenge to the result.” This is likely the right mindset to have when approaching the economic crisis and its effect on local government budgets, and the rest of their site has valuable suggestions as well. Check it out here: http://www.oregon.gov/DOR/PTD/IC_504_620.shtml
-Bellevue, WA has had a very effective, planned response to this very problem, and implements many of the ideals of the above document. As this news article explains, the city removed a lot of short-term spending in ways that functioned like triage (on-the-scene, ensure-survival types of actions), and has followed up by a radical change, by implementing a budget based on customer outcomes. Read more about the specifics here:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2012348188_guest14sarkozy.html
-Finally, citizens of Snoqualmie WA have been introduced to the use of electronic handheld voting devices to be used during budgetary meetings. In this way, two important achievements are attained for the budget process: first of all, the city gets an accurate sense of the sentiments of all citizens attending the process, due to the quantitative analysis possible from these types of statistics. Secondly, the citizens themselves get the immediate, clear realization that their vote was literally counted: as the attached PDF shows, each slide during the focus groups held at the Town Hall was followed by an on-screen tabulation of results from the preceding slide’s votes.

Although these are only a few starting points, I think they are a great way of starting to re-envision citizen engagement in the budget process given the economic downturn.

I hope this helps!

Hi Toni:

In looking for some examples for you, I have found some interesting possibilities worth considering:

-In the state of Oregon, there is a clear policy for citizen participation in the budget process in general, one that has bearing on the specifics of your question. Within the outlining of this process, there are multiple instances of “Citizens can expect the opportunity to do an action.” This culminates in the line explaining that “The citizens of a district have the opportunity and the responsibility to be involved in the process. It is more efficient to the overall system when citizens become involved in the development of the budget itself, rather than mounting a legal challenge to the result.” This is likely the right mindset to have when approaching the economic crisis and its effect on local government budgets, and the rest of their site has valuable suggestions as well. Check it out here: <a target='_blank' href='http://www.oregon.gov/DOR/PTD/IC_504_620.shtml'>http://www.oregon.gov/DOR/PTD/IC_504_620.shtml</a> 
-Bellevue, WA has had a very effective, planned response to this very problem, and implements many of the ideals of the above document. As this news article explains, the city removed a lot of short-term spending in ways that functioned like triage (on-the-scene, ensure-survival types of actions), and has followed up by a radical change, by implementing a budget based on customer outcomes. Read more about the specifics here: 
<a target='_blank' href='http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2012348188_guest14sarkozy.html'>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2012348188_guest14sarkozy.html</a> 
-Finally, citizens of Snoqualmie WA have been introduced to the use of electronic handheld voting devices to be used during budgetary meetings. In this way, two important achievements are attained for the budget process: first of all, the city gets an accurate sense of the sentiments of all citizens attending the process, due to the quantitative analysis possible from these types of statistics. Secondly, the citizens themselves get the immediate, clear realization that their vote was literally counted: as the attached PDF shows, each slide during the focus groups held at the Town Hall was followed by an on-screen tabulation of results from the preceding slide’s votes.

Although these are only a few starting points, I think they are a great way of starting to re-envision citizen engagement in the budget process given the economic downturn.

I hope this helps!

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