Submitted by Marc Reposted from YPP
What would an inclusive, transparent budget process look like?
I once took part in such a process and maybe that experience can shed some light on what we might do here in Philadelphia.
It started I the summer of 1975. I was a rising senior at Wesleyan University, and I had just been elected to the Educational Policy Committee, a administration-faculty-student-committee that reported to the faculty.
Wesleyan was in a serious financial crisis and everyone knew that substantial changes in almost every area—from tuition to financial aid to the size of the student body to athletic teams to academic programs—would be necessary to resolve it. Various proposals had been put forward by the administration and a previous student-faculty committee and had been heavily criticized. And the mood of the campus was raw and angry as everyone was concerned about protecting their own turf.
At that point the President of Wesleyan, Colin Campbell, did something incredibly rare among leaders. He opened up the University planning process to the whole community.
His administration released a large report—called the Red Book for color of the paper it was bound in—that set out in great detail the various options the administration was considering in every one of those areas.
Not only that—the university provided stipends and housing for a group of students who met over the summer to evaluate the Red Book options and prepare what became known as the Student Priorities Project report. I was one of those students.
And, in compiling our report, we weren’t limited to just the information in the Red Book. We met with every top administrator in the college and many faculty members to ask questions and gain more information.
Our meetings were open and a parade of students floated through, some staying for just a day, others joining our commmittee, all of them raising questions and offering suggestions.
We prodded and examined the assumptions of the Red Book and found many that made sense and some that didn’t. We pointed out that some of the administrative expected savings could not be met and identified new areas for savings they had overlooked.
We presented a draft of our report to the administration and had a long talk with President Campbell and others about our conclusions. Then we made revisions and released our report in the fall of 1975, where it was subject to at least one large campus discussion and many smaller ones among both students and faculty members.
And when the administration developed the next documents—the Orange Book which narrowed down the options for further consideration and the Green Book which had its final recommendations for the EPC and the faculty—our report and the discussions subsequent to it had clearly made a difference in a few major ideas and lots of smaller ones.
But even more importantly, the mood of the campus had dramatically changed. The widespread fear that the administration had a number of hidden agendas had faded. There was broad acceptance of the need for radical and in some cases unwelcome changes in the University. And the atmosphere of distrust and anger had been largely replaced by a cooperative search for the good of the University. There was, of course, kibitzing, and kvetching, and self-serving arguments in our continued discussions. But a spirit had been created that minimized them as every faction on the campus came together to deal with the crisis.
And President Campbell taught those of us who were interested in politics an incredibly important lesson: leaders can gain power by sharing it with others. For by being honest, open, and transparent with the University community, Mr. Campbell gained two things:
First he learned much more about the various options he was considering and what was important to the various constituencies on campus.
And second, he gained the support he needed not just to push forward difficult plans but, far more importantly, to do it while holding the University together. And the trust he gained that enabled him in the subsequent years, and with similar methods, to institute important academic reforms.
That’s what a real inclusive, transparent budget process looks like and why it can be so powerful.
I’m not going to spend any time here comparing it to the budget process in Philadelphia or explaining how we could do something like that here. The difference between what we do in this city and something closer to the idea of inclusion and transparency is obvious. And while it is not as obvious how we might do something like this in the city, think about for fifteen minutes and you will come up with ten good ideas about what we could that are probably as good as I could develop.
But I will say that, in electing Michael Nutter, this was the kind of budget process many of us thought we would soon have in Philadelphia.
In fact, soon after Mayor Nutters was elected, plans were put in place by the Inquirer’s Civic Engagement program and the Pennsylvania Economy League to create a budget planning exercise that would begin to engage citizens in the kind of planning process I’ve described. My understanding is that this plan was “temporarily” shelved at the request of the new administration.
So far, it is still on the shelf.