The Mayor's Ear

Is it Nutter's job to listen to us?

by Doron Taussig

Evan M. Lopez

democracy looks like ...

The most interesting finding to come out of Philadelphia's recent budget workshops is this: Citizens want a tax hike. Faced with a choice of cutting services or seeking ways to raise revenue, most of the 1,700 people who attended the Penn Project for Civic Engagement's (PPCE) forums consistently expressed a preference for the latter, even if it meant taking money out of their own pockets.

Americans are accustomed to hearing elected officials, when confronted with polling evidence that their positions are unpopular, say they "can't govern by polls." That's fair enough: Polls are fleeting, simplistic and susceptible to manipulation. But this situation is different. These workshops were supposed to be more sophisticated than polls. And Nutter explicitly sold them as part of a public process.

With these results, though, some tricky questions arise. Do the findings from the workshops really represent public sentiment? And with a week to go before Nutter proposes his budget to City Council — and drafts of his proposals leaking already — what's the mayor's responsibility to take public sentiment into account? Should he listen at all?

In terms of specificity, the workshops beat the hell out of a poll. Attendees were given a list of potential service cuts and revenue-generating options, from cutting the city's vehicle fleet to raising the real estate transfer tax. Each item was assigned a point value indicating how much money it would generate. Then, in groups of 20 to 25, citizens debated the options, voted on them and, by accumulating points, tried to "solve" the budget crisis.

Advocates for various causes have tried to use some of the weaknesses in this model to spin the results their way. The Inquirer editorial page, for instance, supports tax cuts, and speculated on Monday that "the silent majority was too busy working to pay their already high taxes to attend any of the mayor's budget forums." Obnoxiousness aside, it's true that the workshops were unscientific: 1,700 people is enough for a statistical sample, but this group was self-selected. White people and women were overrepresented, and the Coalition for Essential Services (CES), an alliance of unions and advocacy organizations, sent members to the meetings to advocate against service cuts.

CES, meanwhile, argued throughout the process that the city had intentionally limited citizens' choices for revenue generation to produce a specific outcome.

"It felt like it was oriented to try to come up with some conclusion, and the conclusion was, we need to cut services," says spokeswoman Gloria Gilman.

There's a strong case to be made for the workshop model, as well: That it produces more sophisticated, thoughtful information than any poll ever could. Harris Sokoloff, Ph.D., who organized the workshops for PPCE, cites the work of the pollster Daniel Yankelovich, who argued that public opinion, particularly in its early stages, is unformed and malleable. The workshops allowed citizens to engage, and, rather than passing judgment in a vacuum ("I don't want to raise the parking tax," say), think through preferences in relation to one another, weighing other people's interests ("I'd rather raise the parking tax than cut recreation centers, since the woman next to me says her kids use them all summer").

Sokoloff believes that the takeaway from the workshops, for the mayor, should be the big picture: themes, like the desire to raise revenue before cutting services. These were the values Philadelphians expressed when they came together and discussed the budget in an informed manner.

If you accept that the workshops yielded valuable information, though, you now have a new concern. During the forums, the term "dog and pony show" was thrown around a lot. The mayor, people worried, wouldn't listen to citizens' recommendations.

Frankly, that conclusion seemed a bit premature coming before the mayor introduced his budget. But we can think about what he owes us in terms of taking our opinions into account.

According to Steve McGovern, a political scientist at Haverford College, what you expect from the mayor depends on your definition of democracy — it depends on "whether you subscribe to a vision of government that emphasizes representative democracy or participatory democracy."

This is the sort of thing dissertations are written about. But in short, someone who prefers a representative approach might lean toward the view that Nutter was elected, he has a job to do and if citizens don't like the outcome, they can vote for someone else in a few years.

Someone who prefers a participatory approach might lean closer to the view that the mayor should listen carefully to his constituents, and if he can't obey them — because how would that even work? — he should at least try very hard to incorporate their ideas.

McGovern observes that, in the past few years in Philadelphia, the participatory model has "seen a resurgence" in popularity. The educated middle-class people who've been moving in and around Center City like it; indeed, it's part of what got Nutter elected.

Just by holding these workshops, McGovern believes, the mayor has outdone his predecessors in terms of citizen involvement.

"John Street and certainly Ed Rendell would likely pay less attention to what citizens have to say," he says.

Which isn't to say that Philly has reached its zenith of participatory democracy. Ben Waxman, who blogs for philly.com's It's Our Money, observes that the city's budget process has long been an "insider's game," understood by a select group of people. This crisis, he believes, has helped educate the public, and the next step in the opening up of government will be a shift in the culture of the political class.

In the report PPCE published about its findings from the workshops, authors Sokoloff and Chris Satullo encourage the administration and Council to "tell citizens how the time and energy they put into coming to these forums was used" — to say where they took the public's advice, and where they diverged and why, so that the public can at least understand the extent of its participation.

For his part, the mayor vowed to take citizen input seriously, and in the leaked budget drafts, he does propose raising taxes. Although not wage or business taxes. Apparently he thinks Philadelphians are wrong about that.

(doron@citypaper.net)