Participatory budgeting won’t save California cities
This spring, Marin County launched a second round of participatory budgeting, inviting residents to help decide how another $2.5 million in public funds should be spent. The program reflects California’s growing embrace of participatory budgeting as an innovative reform.
The idea clearly resonates with many people. More participation should produce better government.
It won’t.
A Reform That Isn’t
Participatory budgeting is presented as a budgeting reform. In reality, it creates a new source of legitimacy for government activity—and with it, another pathway for government to expand its scope.
That matters because California’s cities do not suffer from a shortage of public participation. They suffer from governments whose missions have become vague, broad, and effectively limitless. Municipal mission statements routinely promise to enhance quality of life, promote sustainability, foster equity, and expand services. Once those become the municipality’s purpose, almost any proposed activity can be justified as another legitimate government function.
Unlike a business or nonprofit, a city or county has no external mechanism that tells it when to stop. It neither loses customers nor violates its charter by adding another responsibility; it simply accumulates obligations until every budget becomes an exercise in deciding how much government will do rather than whether it should be doing it at all.
No budgeting reform can change such a dynamic. Some, however, make expansion harder to challenge. Participatory budgeting is uniquely pernicious because it launders expansion in the moral prestige of “democracy” and “community,” making that expansion itself more difficult to challenge.
Vallejo’s Experiment
No California city illustrates this better than Vallejo, the first U.S. city to adopt participatory budgeting citywide. Shortly after emerging from bankruptcy in August 2011, Vallejo voters narrowly approved a one-cent sales tax. Less than two years later, the city dedicated $3.2 million—30 percent of the new revenue—to the nation’s first citywide participatory budgeting process.
Consider what happened. A city that had just proven it could not manage within its means created a new channel for saying “yes”—financed by a tax justified on the most unbounded standard imaginable: quality of life. The program’s stated goals were equally open-ended: to “transform democracy” and “engage the community.” Residents funded everything from street repairs to community gardens, nutrition education, college scholarships, and a Boys & Girls Club gym restoration.
The point is not that these projects lack value. It is that Vallejo exited bankruptcy with the same outsized conception of government’s proper role. The city has since added a new process for identifying activities to fund. The projects carry the imprimatur of “community voice,” making them harder to question.
The institutional change runs deeper than the dollars. When a city adopts participatory budgeting, it creates an officially sanctioned constituency with its own claim on public funds. Whether that constituency is a citywide vote or a committee—Vallejo established a 21-member steering committee—it creates a second source of political legitimacy operating alongside the council. The council retains its legal authority but no longer bears sole responsibility for setting priorities.
Participants answer to the logic of the process — identify needs, allocate resources — not to the obligation to weigh competing municipal functions. What was once a single budget process balancing all municipal priorities becomes two — one of which considers only the priorities brought before it, without regard to the city’s broader obligations.
What Counts as Success?
Advocates argue that participatory budgeting succeeds because it engages more residents, reaches underserved communities, and builds trust. Those are process measures, not measures of municipal success.
Look at how some municipalities’ own programs report results. Los Angeles’s first pilot, L.A. REPAIR, distributed $8.5 million and celebrated ballots cast and zones served; its winning proposals included weekend family camps in Big Bear, yoga and Zumba at a farmers market, and filmmaking training. Meanwhile, the City of Sacramento has gone further, embedding participatory budgeting within its voter-approved Measure U program and evaluating it primarily through participation, outreach, implementation, and other process measures.
These reports demonstrate that the process functioned exactly as designed. They do not demonstrate that residents became safer, businesses more prosperous, infrastructure more reliable, or public money better spent than it would have been otherwise. The announcements read like audits of the process, not evaluations of the results. The reports deem participatory budgeting successful because people participated.
The Real Problem
Supporters also argue that participatory budgeting gives voice to overlooked residents. Sometimes it does—but counting participants cannot establish that the priorities it produces are better or that the activities being funded belong within government’s proper role. The process also distances elected officials from priorities they would otherwise have to defend: when a project is unpopular, they can point to the community process; when it is popular, they can claim credit for listening.
Even if every resident were informed and every resident voted, the outcome would still be illegitimate. The problem is not that the wrong people showed up. It is that public money is treated as a collective pool available for whatever wins a vote. Democracy is not the standard; the rights of residents and business owners are.
Neither greater participation nor broader representation addresses the underlying institutional problem. Municipalities do not need another procedure for deciding how government spends money. They need a principled standard that distinguishes legitimate public functions from desirable private activities.
That standard is rights. Government exists to protect people from force and fraud, and whatever that ultimately requires, it excludes everything that does not serve that purpose. Grant government the most generous rights-based role you like—courts, police, and, if you insist, the roads and water mains that let people move and live under law—and it is still bounded because it answers to something outside itself. “Enhancing quality of life” is bounded by nothing because there is always one more program or service that might improve someone’s quality of life. It excludes nothing and therefore constrains nothing.
The Overlooked Question
The question we should ask is never whether a proposal sounds worthwhile. We should ask whether the standard used to justify it can ever be satisfied.
So the next time a California city announces that residents will “decide how to spend” some slice of public money, ask the only question that matters: What are they not allowed to spend it on? If the answer is “nothing,” the issue is no longer budgeting. It is the absence of any limit on government itself. And if the answer is “they can only rank projects already in the maintenance plan”—fine, but then stop calling it participatory budgeting. Sorting a pre-approved punch list is clerical work with a civic veneer.
California cities will continue experimenting with participatory budgeting and other procedural reforms. Some may improve transparency or engagement. None will solve the underlying problem if government has no boundary in the first place. Before asking who should decide how public money is spent, they must answer the prior question: What is government for? Until our municipalities have a principled answer, every new budgeting reform will simply become another pathway for government to expand its scope.
Mark Moses is a senior fellow with the California Policy Center. He has thirty years of experience in local government administration and finance. His book, The Municipal Financial Crisis – A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting, was published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available from major online booksellers.
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