Ohio city launches digital platform for new participatory budgeting program
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Through the program, residents will have a direct say over how city officials invest taxpayer dollars for infrastructure improvements more effectively, one official says.
Officials in Columbus, Ohio, have launched an initiative aimed at democratizing the municipality’s budgeting process, and, ultimately, creating more actional data insights for city staff.
Under the “Our Voice, Our Choice” participatory budget program, city officials are calling on residents to use an online platform to submit their ideas for capital improvement projects in their neighborhoods. Residents’ direct input and proposals are driving these decisions, Councilmember Nick Banston told Route Fifty.
A participatory budget is about “being able to take neighbors' voices and … put a plan together,” he said. Resident input, for instance, will guide how leaders invest $9 million in capital funds for infrastructure fixes, like repairing sidewalks or enhancing park amenities, the Columbus City Council announced last week.
To do that, Columbus is using an open-source platform, developed by the nonprofit One Project, where city residents can submit comments and interact with each others’ posts discussing how they would like to prioritize investments.
“The more tools we have for residents to engage [with the budgeting process], the better for the city,” Bankston said, adding that the participatory budgeting model “removes the barrier” for community engagement and “takes the guessing work out for city officials” trying to meet constituents’ needs.
The platform includes a digital map on which residents can mark a specific location within the city and provide an explanation of what kind of project they would like to have done there, Bankston explained. Residents’ input is also categorized according to the city’s nine districts so that each one receives $1 million of the $9 million total budget.
Most municipalities realize “there are usually more ideas than money to fund, so participatory budgeting becomes a dual function for a city to allocate money and listen to the community,” said Aaron Tanaka, CEO of One Project. Ultimately, the approach can help create a “menu of priorities from their own residents,” he said.
Since the Columbus platform launched, there have been 123 suggestions left by residents. Currently, priorities range from traffic safety measures like installing bike lanes to beautifying local corridors by planting more trees. Users have until Aug. 28 to share their ideas for capital improvement projects in their districts, after which the city will move forward with the next phase of the participatory budgeting process, Bankston said.
Under that phase, volunteer delegates from each district “will sit with city staff to refine the ideas to put them into actual projects that have cost estimates and … back out to the community for the fourth and final phase, which is voting, and that will happen later in November and December,” he explained.
“Regardless of if someone's project gets voted on or comes to fruition, [city leaders and staff] are going to be able to utilize this data to better inform our capital improvements plan” moving forward, Bankston said, adding that data analytics from the platform “gives us data on where we can target and hone investments, and that's what I'm really looking forward to at the end: How do we aggregate that data, analyze it and utilize it for long-term infrastructure planning?”
The participatory budget approach is gaining traction in the U.S., particularly at the local level. Chicago is largely credited with being the first municipality to implement the budgeting system in 2009, and more than 500 localities have followed suit in some form as of 2024, according to the Government Finance Officers Association.
Other major cities implementing participatory budgeting include Boston, New York City and Denver. Last month, Rochester Hills, Michigan also launched a similar digital hub for residents to interact with data visualizations of the city’s budget plan and submit feedback.