Heads up Richmond residents: the city has $3 million and they want you to help decide how to spend it.
It’s called The People’s Budget because the people come up with ideas on how to spend the money and vote to choose which ones they like. It launched Tuesday in the city’s Jackson Ward neighborhood.
“You’re here because I had a dream about 2018 about putting money in your hands to help spend what you wanna see fixed in your neighborhood,” said Richmond City Council member — and mayoral candidate — Andreas Addison. Addison helped get the People’s Budget, also known as participatory budgeting, off the ground and now he’s looking forward to the public submitting ideas.
“We’re gonna see needs across the city, no more of us fighting each other on the things you wanna see us do,“ Addison told the crowd of about 50 people who gathered for the launch. “It’s now saying, ‘You know what? We need to put more money in our park bench budget, we need to pour more money in our playground budget because we’ve got a bunch of districts asking for the same thing.’”
To participate you need to be over 14 and live in the city. You can submit your capital improvement ideas online or through postcards distributed at local events. They’ll go before a group of folks in each city district. Then they’ll be turned into proposals, which the public will vote on in the spring and projects could be online as early as 2026.
But the pilot program is as much about getting the people of Richmond talking as it is about funding projects.
Matthew Slaats, City Council’s civic innovation manager, said he hopes the process can, “move the city forward: to really reconcile how the residents here can interact with each other and really build an equitable and inclusive city.”
You can find out more about the Richmond People’s Budget at RVAPB.ORG.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
