Title
Notice/Advertisement Title: Participatory Budget Hearing
Contact Name: Jean-Philippe Dorval
Contact Telephone Number: 614-645-2898
Contact Email Address: jpdorval@columbus.gov
Body
On Wednesday April 29th, Council Member Bankston, chair of the Finance and Governance Committee will hold a hearing to unveil and discuss steering committee recommendations on the establishment of the city’s first Participatory Budgeting pilot.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget, typically through brainstorming, proposal development, and voting. New York City, Boston, and Seattle all have strong participatory budgeting processes that use various funding sources. For Columbus, Council Member Bankston was able to secure 9 million dollars in last year’s capital budget to be used in this pilot. The 9-million-dollar pot will be split among the 9 Council Districts, leading to a 1-million-dollar pot for each district.
The Participatory Budgeting process is split between 5 phases, Process Design, Idea Collection, Proposal Development, the Vote and Project Implementation. The first phase, process design, was completed in February of this year by an 18-person steering committee completely made of city residents representing all 9 Council districts. This hearing will kick off the idea collection phase of the process.
Any resident seeking to submit written testimony should forward it to the office of Council Member Bankston. Written testimony must be received by 10am on the day of the hearing (Wednesday) and emailed to Jonathan Brown at jbbrown@columbus.gov <mailto:jbbrown@columbus.gov>.
The meeting will be live streamed on the City’s YouTube channel and Facebook.