Seattle City Council Must Be Urged to Move the Funds for Seattle’s Winning Participatory Budget Projects— Not a Choice, but a Promise That’s Collecting Dust
Preface (Optional/Omittable)
The murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers sparked nationwide protests, with calls to defund the police and justice for Black victims of police violence. This horrific and public tragedy forced people to confront the racism, oppression, and white supremacy of the systems that our government foundations are built upon, and the role that the City of Seattle has in perpetuating institutional racism and violence.
These calls led to acknowledging the need to engage groups who are typically under-resourced and left out of decision-making opportunities to improve their communities. Participatory Budgeting (PB) was selected as a democratic approach that moves critical resources to the necessary communities and is designed to maximize the involvement of those communities in the decision-making process. The PB process does this through multiple stages designed to build a plan for authentic community involvement, and ensure governments are set to support community members in community’s development of feasible proposals.
The City of Seattle website agrees that PB gives real people real power over how the City spends its budget. It deepens democracy, builds stronger communities, and creates more equitable distribution of resources.
In this $27M PB process the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) was selected as the third-party administrator to establish and implement a community-led PB process that would invest $27.25M of one time funding. The goal of this PB process was to directly invest in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities consistent with applicable law and to increase the ownership and participation of City residents in solutions to the city’s pressing needs.
This community-led process intentionally sought to include the voices of people with lived experiences that were usually left out: People who have experienced homelessness or incarceration, Disabled people, Trans people, Black women, Indigenous people, Youth and Older Adults.
This brought together members from a diverse array of communities and interest groups to brainstorm and produce proposals for programs that would address the most pressing needs in Seattle as determined by a Black Brilliance Research Report and data collected through dozens of community events to harvest ideas from members of the very populations whose neighborhoods are most impacted by decades of institutional racism, poverty, residential displacement and police violence in Seattle.
The following 6 projects were identified as desired community investments:
These proposals were developed and written by community members with input from individuals having lived experiences of various issues such as homelessness, food insecurity, police harassment, crime, violence, and institutional racism. Hundreds of ideas were collected from interviews with community members and activists. Budget Delegates were tasked with translating those ideas into project proposals to address the most pressing issues. Community members who stepped up to be Budget Delegates or Facilitators worked closely with professionals from City departments relevant to the proposed project to determine the feasibility and formulate budgets.
Right now, with the recent change in City Council, tensions are rising and the possibility of City Council abandoning the finished participatory work grows. City Council might not move the funds to where they belong and even worse, City Council is likely hoping to reabsorb the $27M to compensate for Seattle’s $230M budget deficit. This is not okay, $27M is barely 12% of the deficit, but this specific $27M has been sitting for years, depreciating in value, and community has been wondering if it even exists. Why would you reabsorb money that was already pledged to be for reinvesting in community?
It would be insulting not just to the thousands of voters who engaged and the dozens of involved community members who dedicated their time and labor for months to support the process by building trust with organizations in the community to reach more people while others drafted proposals from the hundreds of collected ideas, but also the Black and Brown activists who rallied for this money, especially since SPD was never actually defunded. To not implement the winning projects would mean to disrespect the cumulative efforts of the greater community. BIPOC communities, but especially Black communities, were promised community investments, and to deny it to them after waiting years would cause unforgivable damage to the trust community members put in the City’s elected officials to keep promises and maintain positive relations with constituents. The delays have already humiliated and demeaned every working community member affiliated to Seattle’s PB process as they have received disproportionate amounts of media criticism compared to the Seattle Office for Civil Rights that housed the process. Many of the community members that worked for this process would attest to having frustration and disappointments with the lack of collaboration and communication from the City to support this process and aid our third party administrator based in New York considering the high stakes.
Coming from a former youth that worked to support this process, it was beyond stressful to have such an enormous burden on the shoulders of everyday community members who chose to step up. I can vouch for PBP being authentic in their efforts, but the power dynamic between us and the City was that of a manipulative relationship— you stay in good faith because you think you can fix it and it will get better over time, but it never does and just gets worse. From the words of an anonymous community member, “The community still are unaware of this whole situation, by design. They [City Council/SOCR] are not your friends”.
To reiterate, here’s more by some Community Representatives— Dr.Conley, Sirena Styles, Talisa Lavarry (now resigned) , Kalie Vo, Barbara Tisi— who were tasked with keeping accountable the City Staff that are supposedly working behind the scenes to bring the PB projects to life:
“These projects, meticulously crafted by community members with firsthand experiences, represent tangible solutions to homelessness, food insecurity, and other pressing issues. Any deviation from honoring this commitment risks undermining community trust and derailing the democratic process.
Recent discussions acknowledge the increasing likelihood of funds being diverted due to a budget shortfall, which would disrespect the time and labor Participatory Budgeting Project put into Seattle’s process. Such a reversal would not only betray the dedicated efforts of community members, but also contradict the fundamental principles of community-led decision-making.
It is crucial to recognize the significance of honoring promises made to the community and sustaining the momentum of community leadership in Seattle. The success of these initiatives serves as a testament to the strength of community collaboration and the potential for lasting positive change. Again, reneging this promise and taking back funds is an attack on community contributions-- their time and labor spent engaging, collaborating, leading-- and will further contribute to the new City Council’s reputation for being anti-community.
Although the modest amount of money committed to these one-time funded projects will not solve the problems, they will represent introductory investments and test the feasibility of continued funding and expansion to hopefully attract additional public and private funding.
Additionally, we [youth and BIPOC] are tired of being used as pawns to promote the City’s reputation as pro-community when it is not since we have actually felt disempowered from our experiences”.
It did not help when on November 14th, 2023, before the winning proposals were announced, The Seattle Times editorial board published a defamatory, if not malicious editorial article titled ‘Seattle’s $27 million experiment in participatory budgeting is not worth repeating’, providing a biased, ill-informed narrative that prematurely denigrated Seattle’s $27M Participatory Budgeting Process. The editorial, while it brings up valid concern— such as that traditional budget process should change to be inclusive of resident voices—, asserts an incomplete narrative curated by biased writers, and breeds further uninformed judgments on the process.
Meanwhile, SOCR never did any media control responding to the harm this writing did or to address rising negative perception of the process. Why is it more achievable for a Seattle Times editorial criticizing the process right after it ends to attract more conversation and viewership than our process with the little media attention it got. It’s embarrassing to have nobody care until it is over so they can laugh about it. Where was the energy seen in those comments when the process was in progress? Oh? You’re mad about how the City spends our money? We are too, that is why we wanted to hear from underrepresented community members. I imagine since being a commenter requires a Seattle Times subscription, that those people were not the intended BIPOC audience of these funds, but all of those people complaining about the process could have been people who contributed to it. If more people had submitted ideas and votes, this process would have turned out differently. Personally, I’m content with the winning proposals, I just need them to actually happen and be done with the care and intentions the community had when thinking about it. We don’t want funds drained by more administration expenses before they actually accomplish the task of treating the issue.
Referring back to the editorial, one of the many flawed opinions the article makes is that “Instead of a tax hike, the mayor or council should have been brave enough to pull the plug on the Participatory Budget and used that money instead [to pay for $20M of mental health services in Seattle Public Schools]” This phrasing encourages a harmful, competitive mindset that pits issues against each other. Both issues deserve to see solutions and can be funded independently of each other. The wealth gap is getting worse, so we know what entities have the money to be taxed more. There are definitely worse ways the City has and wants to irresponsibly spend money, such as sweeping homeless people and surveillance technology. Moreover, how does the Editorial team or the City expect the youth fellows to develop a lifelong interest in local government after disparaging the outcomes of their contributions?
Main criticism of the process was that it was confusing, poorly managed, and that the votes should not be enough to represent a community decision, but these were both internal and external struggles, and not ones community was in control of. Delays started because positions were struggling to be filled and snowballed due to lack of internal support from the City. Community members were also confused as to why this process had not been further endorsed or announced by official voices in the City.
The editorial’s comment section then criticizes the participation of certain community populations (namely BIPOC and young people) from a voice in how ‘their’ tax dollars are spent and instead supports an oligarchical style of identifying and proposing solutions for other people.
Why does the perceived ‘failure’ of this completed while not-yet implemented process mainly criticize community members who were recruited to support the process rather than the lack of internal support from the City to boost awareness for this process? Ironically, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, the Director of OCR, was someone nobody in the PB scene had even heard of, which means he was speaking to a process he didn’t contribute to yet had the power to spread more awareness about.
The Editorial, in its haste and ignorance, failed to discuss the merit of the intended projects.
After Seattle’s Participatory Budgeting Process voting phase wrapped up in November 2023, the responsibility of implementation officially shifted to Seattle’s City Budget Office to draft legislation allocating the funds to the respective departments and for Department Representatives to prepare and present fully-developed implementation proposals for City Council to vote on.
Though logistically, City Council must vote to move the funds, we must let them know this is not a choice— this is a promise and will that’s collecting dust.
For the City to preach about equity and claim to ‘recognize that systemic racism through the investments and policies by government and the private sector have caused generational harm and resulted in disinvestments in Black, Indigenous, and communities of color’ (Equitable Communities Initiative 2021), but not do the appropriate reinvestment in BIPOC communities is an insult to the abundance of advocacy seen in Seattle led by and in support of the most vulnerable populations. Community has not seen the money be put where the City’s mouth is.
Despite the divisive political landscape of today, it is not hard to see how much Seattleites care about where their money goes, despite the obstacles and limited opportunities for public engagement that purposefully make it difficult for community to be involved in decision-making discussions.
Recently, in the face of Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Council’s efforts to push for invasive surveillance technology, community pushed back and said NO to becoming a Surveillance City, expressing that the technology is ineffective if not useless, expensive, racist, harmful, and overall does not help people feel safer. But how did the City respond? They merely extended the public comment period twice, instead of taking the hint and giving up on the surveillance technology.
There are so many more connected topics that could not be captured in this writing, but we need more eyes on this money, more people talking about what needs to be done, and we need more people willing to mobilize to show City Council we care where the money goes and there will be consequences if the money doesn’t go where it belongs.
Related Real Change article