Today, was the first day of the workshop, which was my official reason for coming to South America. The subject of the workshop is "Citizen Involvement In Participatory Budgeting." Its a group of about 40 participants from 18 countries - (Peru, Chile, Brazil, Columbia, Bolivia, Mexico, USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Italy, Uganda, South Africa, Phillipines, China, Uraguy, India, and more...).
I was quite surprised to learn, that one of the 6 main case studies that we are looking at is on the "Neighborhood Revitalization Project" in Minneapolis.
Anyway, this has got me thinking about citizen participation in budgeting in my own home town. It seems that the major opportunity for citizen participation (outside of voting) in St. Paul, would be the district council system. Yet, our district council system really has very little to do with setting budget priorities for our city.
For the purpose of this event, we are looking at three main areas of citizen involvement in budgeting:
1) Revenue Generation 2) Budgeting 3) Monitoring of Expenses
Anyway, while I'm exchanging stories with citizen participation activists from Uganda and India, I'd love to hear some thoughts from back home about the quality of input that you all think citizens have in setting budget priorities for St. Paul.
What are the primary mechanisms for citizen input
into the budget process in St. Paul?Are they effective?
Do you think that citizens ought to have a greater
role in budgeting in our city? Do citizens have adequate access to the information
necessary to monitor budget expenses in St. Paul?Think about the NRP program in Mpls as one example of how this might happen. Can anyone give the rest of the group, a quick description of what the MPLS NRP program is?
http://www.nrp.org/
Thanks,
Tim Erickson Hamline Midway [EMAIL PROTECTED]
See my travel blog: http://timinbrazil.blogspot.com
-- ================================================= Tim Erickson http://www.politalk.com St. Paul, MN - USA 651-643-0722 [EMAIL PROTECTED] iChat/AIM: stpaultim =================================================
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