Disclaimer: The following is a letter to the editor. It represents their personal views on this issue. RVA Magazine is committed to providing a platform for community voices on important local matters. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of RVA Magazine, its staff, or affiliates.
This Letter to the Editor, written by Dan Coakley, is a response to Letter to the Editor: Democracy on a Budget by Ian Hess, which we published last week. You can read that HERE.
When I first heard about the Richmond People’s Budget, I have to admit my first reaction was skepticism. The city’s going to try and engage with residents to see what we want, instead of pushing some pie-in-the-sky package of shiny toys that we know are going to be expensive and are assured will generate economic activity? That certainly didn’t sound like the city government I’ve seen since I moved here to go to VCU in 2006.
Not any more aware of politics than a typical college student, my time since then has been bookmarked by various top-down projects that never felt fully above board. The baseball stadium, the training camp, the baseball stadium again, Navy Hill, the baseb–-casino, the casino again, the baseball stadium but probably for the last time…I was there for all the times it felt like Richmonders were succeeding in spite of the city government, not alongside it.
However, the more I learned about the People’s Budget, the more I started nodding along—this could be something really great. Maybe they were really serious this time. Districts that need more resources are getting more resources? There’s a statement of intent to address historic inequity? I was loving this.
What really won me over was the effort to be inclusive, to make participation throughout the process open to everyone in Richmond. You wouldn’t have to set aside a couple hours during the workday to go sit in a meeting and wait your turn to speak. City staff were collecting ideas at farmers markets and door-to-door, plus there was an online form—available in both English and Spanish. I decided to submit a couple ideas myself.
My ideas, like most of the over 1,900 gathered during the second phase of the People’s Budget, weren’t sexy. They weren’t communal art installations, they weren’t going to repair some of the major fault lines in our communities, but they felt important to me.
When I moved into my home near Forest Hill, some of my first conversations with neighbors were about people speeding dangerously down our street—it connects two busy roads, so some drivers see it more as a shortcut than the neighborhood where kids play and people walk their dogs. We have no sidewalks, and in the long winter nights a big chunk of the street is barely lit. So my ideas were to add a speed bump, install sidewalks, and install a light. Not sexy—but at the same time, so important to make my neighborhood safer and more walkable for everyone.
As the weeks passed, I learned about the opportunity to participate in the People’s Budget as a budget delegate. About 75 other people applied, and in the end 27 were chosen—three for each of the nine districts. We met for two hours every week in January and February, with a couple unforeseen weeks off due to the water shutoff and winter weather.
I was extremely impressed by this group, which was diverse across every axis you could think of. There was racial and gender diversity. We had teens and older folks, white-collar, blue-collar, and no-collar workers, lifelong residents and recent arrivals, small business owners and corporate officers—all drawn together with one goal: to help steward this process and bring to fruition some of the projects important to people in our neighborhoods.
This group put in an impressive amount of volunteer time and effort. In addition to winnowing down a list of hundreds of ideas to find common themes and envision projects that spoke to those communal needs, some groups met with neighborhood associations, individuals out in the community, and subject-matter experts from the city. We weighed our options strategically—with several similar projects, is it better to bundle them all into one idea, or put each one up as a separate voting item? Should we submit this idea that we’re pretty sure won’t make it to voting because we think it will generate some interest from the relevant city department to implement it on their own?
One delegate in my district created a map of all the idea submissions so we could find themes. Another district’s group combined a detailed map of heat islands with another map showing bus station amenities to drive some of their decision-making. Some groups did incredible research outside of our weekly working hours to narrow down and price out their project recommendations.
You can see in the idea proposals available on the People’s Budget website exactly why delegates thought the projects were important. For all this, we earned a $200 stipend from the city (which, almost four months after wrapping up work, we’re still waiting for—but has been funded). We weren’t here for the money. We were here to show up for our city and our neighborhoods.
One important lesson I learned during this project is how easy it is to look at the end result—say, build a sidewalk—and think that because the output isn’t very sophisticated looking, it’s cheap and easy to get there. However, before a sidewalk can be installed, the ground needs to be surveyed. Water pipes, electric cables, and other utilities may need to be moved. Land needs to be cleared. Parking needs to be managed. There are likely multiple contractors involved who need to be coordinated. There’s the materials cost, the labor cost, and overhead that gets added from managing it all.
The rule of thumb we were given is that one block of sidewalk costs about $100,000—turns out, a lot of things that are easy to take for granted are actually pretty expensive to build.
Another lesson I learned about city budgeting is that it’s ongoing—maintenance must be contemplated in the first-year budget. Many projects called for planting trees and native plants, which is admirable and important work to do. Natives are generally less maintenance-intensive since they evolved to live here. However, even natives need to be maintained for a couple years to allow their root systems to develop and give them time to harden up. If your budget doesn’t include two years of maintenance, there’s no guarantee that will be available in future years, and you may have just planted a bunch of future sticks.
These lessons all resonated with me, but I think there are important lessons we all can learn from the first cycle of the Richmond People’s Budget. First is that we should approach it with a bias toward extending the benefit of the doubt. How exciting is it that we all get to participate in the city’s first-ever experiment with a direct budgeting process? Not only are all of the supporting processes new, the whole idea is new as well—and we are going to make a misstep or a stumble every once in a while.
The important thing is that every single individual I encountered as part of this process was trying their best to do good work for their neighbors. So much of our culture now revolves around hot takes and statements designed for social media, where outrage and the fast clicks it produces drive engagement. But this mindset is a detriment to the collaborative future-building that will help Richmond continue to be an amazing city that punches above its weight.
Another important lesson is that Richmond is a city in transition. We’ve got enough of Maslow’s Hierarchy secured that we can start thinking about nice-to-have projects and ideas. There are big parts of the city where everything is reasonably walkable, you’ve got access to parks and recreation, and maybe the worst thing you have to worry about is some potholes or a pocket park that could be prettier.
However, there is a tension—some neighborhoods and areas that have historically been ignored continue to languish. The People’s Budget is an opportunity to push back against the inertia of apathy.
The final lesson I hope we all take from the Richmond People’s Budget: we are important. Our ideas matter. Our needs matter. Our voices matter. Maybe it’s messy sometimes, and maybe it doesn’t always go the way we want, and we certainly won’t always all agree with everything—but we’re all working toward one greater goal.
This country started with a dream—and it’s more and more important to come back to this every day—that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The People’s Budget represents not just the dream of our city, but the whole project of American democracy.
As the People’s Budget continues into the building stage of the first cycle, I’ll be keeping an excited eye on the projects. And as the second cycle starts to get spun up, I’d encourage everyone to get involved in the way they can—whether it’s volunteering for the steering committee, as a budget delegate, submitting ideas, or even just voting (and telling all your friends to vote too). You matter, and you make this city we call home better when you’re involved with it.
Find out more about Richmond People’s Budget HERE
Photo by Davide Ragusa
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