On Saturday, Albuquerque City Councilor Nichole Rogers announced that a new wellness center will be built in the International District, where individuals and families will be able to access coordinated services all under one roof.
It’s not uncommon for a city to allocate some of its infrastructure funds to such a project, particularly where there’s chronic homelessness, poverty, and other significant life challenges. But the way the decision was made to spend that money involved a practice now spreading in New Mexico called participatory budgeting—a democratic means for people both to propose infrastructure projects and to vote on them.
Hundreds of projects were proposed by the community, including by kids. Councilor Rogers and her staff, along with some community partners, narrowed the list to 11 projects based on common themes and feasibility given the available funds. The $1.7 million at stake represents a tiny fraction of the $175 million in the city’s infrastructure budget. But that’s how much each of the city’s nine councilors have to decide how to spend.
For the past few years, Rogers has been the only City Councilor piloting participatory budgeting. But last month, District 1 Councilor Stephanie Telles, who represents most of the city’s northwest side, kicked off her participatory budgeting process. Otherwise, City Councilors decide for themselves.
“When you think about participatory budgeting,” said Telles, “at its core, at its foundation—it's about the community participating in the projects that they want to see in their neighborhoods.”
The practice of participatory budgeting began in Brazil in the late 1980s. Soon after that, Nina Wallerstein, who directs the University of New Mexico’s Center for Participatory Research, joined a network of participatory researchers with Brazilian colleagues.
“So it's been a whole network of ongoing co-learning that I've got the benefit of,” said Wallerstein, “because I've been able to learn from Brazilian partners.”
Participatory research started decades before participatory budgeting, but it’s a broader term that includes studying the practice of participatory budgeting, now being done in more than 7,000 cities worldwide.
The study of that practice is what prompted it in Councilor Rogers’ District 6: Students who were studying it at the University of New Mexico under Andreas Hernandez, Director of UNM’s Sustainability Studies Program, presented Councilor Rogers with the idea of enacting participatory budgeting in her district.
“Ten minutes into the presentation, I was like, ‘We're doing it!’” Rogers recounted to the small crowd who gathered Saturday at the International District Library to hear which project the community selected as the winner in this second round of participatory budgeting.
The top three were the wellness center (estimated cost, $310,000) in the former Shriners building at 6600 Zuni Rd. SE, followed by the community kitchen ($525,000) in the same building, and the skate park ($400,000), which was proposed by kids, who also could vote for projects if they were at least 11 years old. Even though that total ($1,235,000) is well below the $1.7 million budget, it’s not certain whether there will be enough funds to do the skate park.
“The government gets price-gouged—let's just say that,” said Rogers, who added that contractors raise their bids when they hear it’s a city project. “They do charge us more. They think we have unlimited dollars, but we don't.”
The community-proposed projects could still happen, though. Rogers said it just takes finding funding from other sources.
“We funded seven out of the nine projects last year,” said Rogers of her first round of participatory budgeting, with additional funding coming via the mayor’s budget, bond measures, and other means.
But just because a project is funded, constructed, and opened, it can still take time before it is fully activated. The winner of last year’s participatory budgeting process—a food and vendor market named “The People’s Market”—has been open since its ribbon-cutting ceremony this past June, but only as a shared space, “like a park,” said Rogers.
To activate it as a market required hiring an operator, which Rogers said was finally done. “So people will start seeing it activated at the end of [this month].”
