Should citizens decide how to spend public money?

The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

The diseased state of America’s democracy was never more in evidence than during the unseemly struggle to find a Speaker for the US House of Representatives. Ordinary Americans are fed up with political paralysis, so now some are trying to fix democracy from the ground up.

Several US cities — including New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and the small town of Evanston, Illinois, where I live, — are experimenting with “participatory budgeting”, a form of direct democracy that lets citizens decide how some public money is spent. Pioneered in Brazil in 1989, it has been tried around the world, including the UK.

It’s a “school for democracy”, according to Vincent Russell, who helped introduce participatory budgeting to Greensboro, North Carolina almost a decade ago. “We only need to look outside our window to see the ways our current political system does not work for everyday people,” he says, adding “even if it’s just a little, it can shift people’s perspective on the role of government and what it can achieve”.

But earlier this year Greensboro gave up on the process. It failed, said Russell, partly because city leaders resisted it. It’s also in decline in Brazil, where it started. And research done by the city of Burnsville, Minnesota, on projects around the US, found that, on average, only 1.3 per cent of locals participated in such polls.

That didn’t deter Evanston from inviting me and my neighbours to vote last month on how to spend $3mn in American Rescue Plan funds. Turnout was a whopping 8.4 per cent.

Jimmy Hill, 74, cast his vote at the local community centre, where an unattended cardboard box invited him to “Vote Here”. “I’ve lived in Evanston for 55 years and I’m a taxpayer but I feel like I’m not really involved in what happens,” Hill told me. “This makes me feel more engaged in the political process”.

I voted for seven projects, including a mobile dental bus (for those, like my kids, whose state medical insurance isn’t accepted by Evanston dentists), an entrepreneurship mentoring programme run by an African-American single mother, and a senior transport subsidy. They all lost. Winners included mental health first aid training, affordable refugee housing and small business grants.

Evanston, which I often joke is more leftwing than several communist countries I have lived in, faced no apparent pushback to giving anyone aged 14 and over — whether registered voters or not — the chance to spend so much federal money. Not so the Midwest city of Cleveland, where the mayor and city council presidents fervently oppose a proposal on next week’s ballot that would designate two per cent of the city’s general fund ($14mn at current levels) to a permanent People’s Budget.

“This will be devastating,” Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin, a Democrat, told me. Opponents say the process, which would be run by a steering committee, will create a “shadow government with unelected, inexperienced and unaccountable people spending millions of dollars”. It could lead to cuts in services and staff but Griffin says it’s hard to fight: “when you put people and democracy in the same sentence, people think it’s a good thing”.

Molly Martin, lead organiser for campaign group People’s Budget Cleveland, told me “one of the beauties of PB is that it’s training everyday citizens to ask smart questions”.

But an editorial in the local newspaper argues that the city “already has a participatory budgeting process. It’s called City Council. Any citizen who wants to participate in how the city spends its money is free to run for council, attend council meetings, and of course, vote”. In Evanston, the same city email that announced the result of our PB vote also invited me to public hearings to influence the main city budget.

But Gary Hytrek, who is involved in a California scheme, says “PB is less about voting than about learning to ‘do’ democracy. Discussing how money is spent and the needs of communities is more important than the physical act of voting”. He believes we have to start with civic engagement “to break through the partisan divide at the national level”. Maybe it’s time we went right back to brass tacks on democracy in our own neighbourhoods. I’ve given up thinking anything can be done to cure Congress.