Participatory Budgeting

We are working to promote participatory budgeting in the City of Corning. Click here to download and sign a petition calling for the City to set up a participatory budgeting process. A second, related petition, which grows out of our work on the budgeting referendum, is for a referendum to add a formal referendum process to the City Charter. Click here to download and sign the referendum process petition. The petitions have been developed by Darin Robbins, a Green Party member from Corning. Return completed petitions to Darin, 78 Sterling Street, Corning, NY 14830.

About Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a process of democratic deliberation and decision making. Ordinary people can decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget. Participatory budgeting allows citizens to identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects as well as give them the power to make real decisions about how tax revenue is spent.

Participatory budgeting impacts communities by:

1. Giving people real power over real money.
2. Increasing civic engagement and political participation, especially by historically marginalized people.
3. Creating new community leaders.
4. Establishing more equitable and effective public spending.

Participatory budgeting started in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 as an anti-poverty measure that helped reduce child mortality by nearly 20%. Since then participatory budgeting has spread to over 3,000 cities around the world and has been used to decide budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions.

Participatory Budgeting and Police Reform

One concrete application of the benefits of participatory budgeting is in the context of police reform. When a community demands structural change of their police force in order to address issues of police brutality and structural racism, the public examination of the section on police spending in the city budget becomes vital. Members of the community must have easy and direct access to the city budget in order to be well informed, and they must be able to use participatory budgeting in order to make the necessary changes on how the city prioritizes different methods for public safety as well as other public services.

The link below is to the online copy of the 2021 budget of the City of Corning:

https://www.cityofcorning.com/vertical/sites/%7BBE0E976C-81B9-4F4C-8763-A90E76CF4D33%7D/uploads/2021_CITY_BUDGET.pdf

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