From the Ashes of Bankruptcy: an Assessment of the Collaborative Nature of the City of Vallejo's Participatory Budgeting Process

On April 18, 2012, the City of Vallejo adopted a participatory budgeting process that enables the public to influence the allocation of approximately $3 million of revenue from their recently passed sales tax measure, Measure B. Vallejo is the first city in the nation to adopt participatory budgeting 'city-wide' and for general funding. Other communities, such as the 49th ward in Chicago and a few City Council Districts in New York City, have experimented with participatory budgeting on a limited basis, but not on the citywide scale that Vallejo has pursued. The use of participatory budgeting has the potential to "open up" local government and create a stronger connection between government and its citizens, as well as, better educate and empower citizens on how their tax money is spent. In this thesis, I explore whether this participatory budgeting process in Vallejo can actually attain the public collaboration that it wishes to achieve, based on the properties intrinsic to collaborative governance. To assess Vallejo's participatory budgeting plan and process, I first analyze the city's adopted Rulebook for the process in relation to the Center for Collaborative Policy at California State University, Sacramento's "Collaborative Public Involvement Framework". Additionally, I draw from interviews I conducted interviews with various organizers of the process, including answers to questions ranging from an assessment of respondents' opinions about the process used in Vallejo, to their own evaluation of the rationale used in determining its various rules. I find that the process adopted in Vallejo fits many of the criteria for a collaborative public decision-making process but with four main caveats. First, the City Council's ability to override any decision made by the public potentially casts doubt over the public's actual ability to influence the process. Second, the short period between the City Council's approval of the process and its beginning creates a situation in which citizens might feel rushed to become educated on the budget and become involved in the process. Third, the city's heavy reliance on the Participatory Budgeting Project potentially presents implementation issues if the city wished to continue the process into a second year. Last, the lack of concrete performance measures could potentially provide confusion around whether the process is an ultimate success. With these caveats, the process that Vallejo has chosen to undertake presents a potentially positive development in the area of public participation in public budget decision-making. Depending on the results of the process, participatory budgeting could potentially spread to other cities throughout the Bay Area and the country as whole.