Real Money, Real Power? by Daniel Williams & Don Waisanen

Author:Daniel Williams & Don Waisanen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030592011
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Speaker 2:

And the example there is that the Department of Sanitation doesn’t allow you to … If you want to do a bunch of street trash cans they don’t allow you to bundle them so that you can do two things. … One trash can itself is not enough to be a capital project so that agency specifically says you can’t do that so that may come up.

The point here is that Department of Sanitation applies administrative rules that, at a minimum, are not explained to the PB participants. The Department of Sanitation has an administrative rule that prevents the bundling of smaller objects to make a capital project (the minimum cost in 2018 when this happened was $35,000). This administrative rule might be reasonable, although it appears inconsistent with a different administrative rule at the Department of Education that allows the bundling of computers to achieve a target value. Whether reasonable or not, the PB participants don’t understand that it ultimately expresses an arbitrary view.

Wrestling with larger city agencies certainly brought into view how much equity and inclusion the participants in these meetings felt they had too, since so much of what was being discussed was accountable to agency or representative oversight. Sometimes the speakers wrestled with the crossings of these agencies—who has what jurisdiction with certain budgeting matters—for instance, as one participant asked the others if there was “in the past another committee for traffic and would that fall under parks and environment this year?” Another speaker replied that it may be a possibility, since the Department of Transportation “doesn’t want to be a part of this process.” Figuring out which agencies should be involved, for what reasons, and whether or not these desires were laid out in stone somewhere, or simply the preference of some individual or group within constituted barriers to the deliberative processes.

Research notes from the second delegate training meeting show several topics of interest.4 First, delegates are seated in groups according to the category they will examine. Second, the notes do not describe an overview session, instead this session includes meeting with agency representatives. This fact leaves it unclear whether the council office held another prior meeting that was not communicated to the research team, or whether, instead, this council office simply combined the two types of meetings. Because of this arrangement, the observer joined one of the groups. A specific research note indicates an agency representative asked each person in that group, “what’s your project idea?”, which the observer understood to mean that the delegate was present to represent his or her own project—bringing further into view the challenge of equity and inclusion at this stage.

A desire for information that was not readily available or available in a form usable in council district-level decision-making also arose in the meeting between delegates and agencies. A back and forth between a delegate and an agency representative concerning projects that are already planned proves illustrative:The delegate asks, “Can we see the list of underway projects to

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