I attended a budget consultation early this morning (no link, the City of Calgary does not publicize this, or other sessions to which I've been invited, on its calendar at http://ourcity-ourbudget-ourfuture.blogspot.com/p/calendar.html) at which an Alderman showed up, said that he's there to listen and not speak, and immediately fulfilled his promise of leaving the premesis. It was highlighted that our group of approximately ten members of the lay public (and ten members of the host organization) was the largest so far. The organizers were sufficiently confounded by the questions provided by the City in their toolkit that they made up their own, and we proceeded into the host organization's best attempt to make something good out of a bad situation.
With every experiment or attempt at something new, there is a good chance of failure. We can either resign, or learn from our mistakes and improve. I write this critique with that second intent--namely that the City of Calgary can learn from these comments to do better in the future.
The City of Calgary's budget consultation process seems designed to fail for several reasons. Our table agreed that this consultation compared favourably to the City's triple bottom line policy, in that the relevant check-box has been marked so the arbitrary decisions can proceed as planned.
1) Why only three months for consultation? We know that the tri-annual budget cycle happens regularly at predictable dates. Why expect citizens, bureaucrats, and council to accomplish a complicated task for the first time in such a short timeframe? What is in place to enable both the City and the lay public to learn from and build on this consultation?
2) Why undermine the City's own professionals with a public consultation? We assume that City employees act professionally in their budgeting and programming. Why ask the lay public to attempt to find flaws in the details of professional work, or the supporting abstract budgets? (If the people managing the City are _not_ professionals, we have an HR problem, rather than a budget problem.)
3) Why present the consultation as a zero-sum game, in which one area of funding can only be increased at the decrease of another? What would X per cent more or less of department or program Y look like, for each of the thousands(?) of expenditures in the budget? Which programs have critical funding thresholds below which they would be inoperative?
4) Simply pairing large dollar figures to seemingly endless lists of services and tasks says nothing about how efficiently or effectively such dollars are spent. We could demand that X become more efficient, but that is not an insight. Members of the lay public lack both information from the City, and expert knowledge about municipal services management, to provide any informed input about this topic.
4) Greater transparency could help, but is insufficient to enabling lay citizens to provide informed input. We are not technical experts sufficiently knowledgable to address budget details. Opening every City document to the public would not fix the knowledge gap. (We would then increase the separation between the public and governance by relying on a small handful of expert analysts and journalists for our opinion instead of elected and hired City officials.) All we can do is provide high-level input about the kind of City in which we want to live.
6) But it's unclear how our high-level input (or even low-level suggestions such as "adjust these knobs that way") translates into experiences of City services on the ground. In short, while we would like to provide input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, and while the City would like our input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, expectations and capabilities are grossly mismatched.
7) Even if the lay public provides well informed and actionable input, parts of the City machinery can ignore override that input at many stages of implementation. Elected officials can make their own decisions against the wishes of the public; bureaucrats can delay implementation or interfere through regulation; and small handfuls of loud voters routinely swing decisions in their favour. Transient gatherings of assorted lay citizens cannot alone indemnify elected and other leaders against public or media backlash for making sustainable decisions for the entire city that also disadvantages some constituency.
8) We discuss creating a culture of innovation at the City, or creating complete communities, or creating inclusive processes, etc. as though we could reliably design and implement such things independently of existing dynamics. However, policy leavers that exist only allow the City to directly influence social dynamics of its own staff. Strict adherence to explicit job roles and responsibilities does not encourage risk taking or iterative failure required to develop new and improved practices.
In short, citizens expect to influence how the City operates through this consultation process, but the process is not configured to solicit or accept the required information. Even if it could use the collected information, the City lacks the mechanisms to communicate or demonstrate its effectiveness in using that information for the immediate budgeting process, without any public plan for follow-through or sustainability.
As Ron Lubensky wrote some time ago, crowd-sourcing government decision-making like this has issues that are reasonably well known: http://www.deliberations.com.au/2010/01/crowd-sourcing-is-not-empowering-enough.html
Why has the City has chosen to change business as usual by going through the motions of a known-faulty consultation using an obsolete model under impossible parameters, instead of planning a genuine consultation for the next budget cycle? Does the appearance of competent grass-roots change continue to be more important than genuine progress to supporters of the current council? The City can now claim that the city "consulted with" (has the endorsement of) umpteen different community organizations for their next budget, amateur axe-grinders and activists alike can feel like they've contributed to the process without having done any substantial work or spending years learning about contemporary governance challenges, and our elected leaders can claim to have met their election promises to "consult with" (cherry-pick several-times filtered input from) many diverse members of the public.
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