Participatory budgeting begins with few Queens pols partaking
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Participatory budgeting winners gathered at City Hall for a celebration in 2018. This year, only three of Queens’ 15 City Councilmembers are partaking in the process. Photo by John McCarten/City Council
By Jacob Kaye
There’s millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on the line – and a select few Queens residents are going to help decide how it gets spent.
With the new City Council in place, participatory budgeting season has begun. The process allows each councilmember to allocate money to project proposals voted on by residents of their district. The money must go to physical infrastructure projects that benefit the public, last for at least five years and cost $50,000 or more. Residents as young as 11 are eligible to vote.
However, councilmembers can choose whether or not they do participatory budgeting, and this year in Queens only a few neighborhoods will have the opportunity to participate.
Of the 15 councilmembers whose district is either entirely or partially in Queens, only three are doing participatory budgeting this year. They include Councilmembers Tiffany Cabán (Astoria, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Woodside), Adrienne Adams (Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Rochdale Village and South Ozone Park) and Jennifer Gutiérrez (Ridgewood, Bushwick and Williamsburg).
With the exception of Staten Island, where none of the borough’s three councilmembers are participating in the program, Queens has the lowest rate of participating members when compared to the other boroughs.
Though those doing participatory budgeting are in the minority in each borough, four of Manhattan’s 10 members are participating, four of the Bronx’s nine members are participating and 4 of Brooklyn’s 15 members are participating.
Participatory budgeting was suspended at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and councilmembers were slow to restart it last year, with only a handful from around the city participating.
The program, in its eleventh year, began informally in 2011, when then-Councilmembers Brad Lander, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Eric Ulrich and Jumaane Williams first started a voting process to dole out discretionary funds.
The program became more formalized in 2018 through a charter revision that tasked the city’s Civic Engagement Commission with expanding participatory budgeting citywide.
Prior to the pandemic, a majority of the council took advantage of the program. In 2019, 33 members participated – more than double the members that are participating this year.
Former City Councilmember Costa Constantinides, who served from 2014 until 2021, said community members would get excited over the program and launch campaigns to make sure their projects got the most votes.
One group, who was looking to clean up a dog park near the entrance to the RFK Bridge, made stickers and buttons to hand out to residents urging them to vote for the project. The project was a winner, and although many of those behind the campaign ended up moving, Constantinides said he was proud of their efforts.
“It’s not about them, it’s about the community,” he said.
Over half of Queens’ current council delegation took office for the first time at the start of the month, and some said the time between being sworn-in and the time to get the program off the ground made participating this year unfeasible. The idea collecting process – the first phase of participatory budgeting – began in November and ends on Jan. 23.
“To be effective, the PB process needs to begin months in advance, and the capacity and timing are not there to have this year,” City Councilmember Lynn Schulman said in a statement to the Eagle. “My focus this year will be on expediting projects already in the pipeline.”
Schulman added that she was a “firm believer in Participatory Budgeting” and said that she plans to participate next year.
City Councilmember Julie Won also cited the turnaround time as a deterrent, adding that the online process for idea submission and voting doesn’t serve a good portion of her constituency.
“Historically the over 60 percent non-native English speakers in District 26 have not been prioritized in the participatory budgeting process,” Won said in a statement. “The new 15 day turnaround for idea collection is not adequate to engage with these communities which would require robust in-person organizing which is not possible during COVID-19.”
“In my district many people don’t have access to the internet or face digital literacy challenges that would prevent meaningful participation in a remote campaign and access to a digital ballot,” she added.
City Councilmember Joann Ariola said that her office wouldn’t be doing participatory budgeting to avoid tensions between community groups in the district.
“It has been used as a model in the past and, although well meaning, it caused issues between community based organizations seeking funding,” Ariola said in a statement to the Eagle. “I will be using a broadly based inclusive model, meeting with individual CBOs who are seeking funding.”
Longer-serving Queens councilmembers also cited capacity concerns as a reason for not participating this year.
A representative from Councilmember Francisco Moya’s office said they were foregoing participatory budgeting to instead focus on COVID recovery efforts. The representative added that the councilmember’s relationships with neighborhood groups and community members will determine how the discretionary funds are spent.
Constantinides said that it took a lot of resources to get the process from start to finish, adding that it was always worth it.
“It’s a work intensive thing,” he said. “It was not easy to run.”
Constantinides’ successor, Cabán, has already seen 48 projects proposed throughout District 22. They range from park revitalization efforts, to commissioning asphalt murals, to fixing up the cafeteria in a local elementary school.
In total, Cabán’s office has set aside $1 million for participatory budgeting capital projects and an additional $50,000 for programs including community classes, planting gardens and art supplies for public art projects.
“Something that we really value is hearing from our community and kind of co-governing alongside them,” said Nomi Tinkelman, a member of Cabán’s constituent services team who’s leading the participatory budgeting process. “We really wanted to make sure that we put aside some money for our community members to submit projects that they are passionate about so that they can really have a say in where our money is going.”
The participatory budgeting process speaks to the heart of how Cabán aims to govern, according to her communications directory Jesse Myerson.
“There are so many top down decisions just getting handed down by unaccountable actors so we are so enthusiastic about vehicles like this for people to directly control the resources in our own community,” Myerson said. “We would love to work with the Council and the mayor to foster more such systems and processes to drive down resources and power to the ground level to the greatest extent possible.”
Following the idea collection phase, project proposals will be submitted to city agencies for evaluation and cost analysis. Ballots will be finalized between mid-February and mid-March and from April 2 to April 10, residents will cast votes in-person and online for their favorite project. Winning projects will be revealed between April 17 and April 22.
For those Queens residents not living in the districts participating in the program, a similar process has been launched in neighborhoods affected most by the pandemic.
Thirty-three neighborhoods across the city have been identified by the Taskforce for Racial Inclusion and Equity and are currently in the process of their own participatory budgeting program.
Run by the Civic Engagement Commission, the TRIE participatory budgeting process is further along than the program run by councilmembers. Queens residents who live in Queensbridge, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, Briarwood, Kew Gardens, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, South Ozone Park, Jamaica, Hollis, Queens Village, Far Rockaway and Broad Channel can currently vote on proposed projects in their neighborhood.
Votes can be cast at participate.nyc.gov.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly quoted City Councilmember Julie Won.
