Preface:
I went to Porto Alegre primarily to study the ‘participative budget’ process, which was created in the city of Porto Alegre after the Workers Party (PT) was elected in 1988-89.
The report is a simple narrative and will confine itself to some observations about the ‘participative budget’ process and conclude with some general observations and recommendations for Canadian participation in the Social Forum III and the Local Authorities for Social Inclusion III to be held in Porto Alegre next year in February.
Participative Budget - Introduction
The participative budget is a whole new way of preparing municipal budgets. Prior to 1988, it didn’t exit. Prior to that date, Porto Alegre prepared its municipal budget exactly the same way every Canadian city and town does. Staff worked hard behind closed doors. The budget was then presented to Committee where it was discussed, small changes were made and then it rose to Council where it was passed. End of story.
In 1988, the social democratic workers party, which was elected for the first time in Porto Alegre, decided that it wanted to find a new way of preparing the city budget. After their successful election, they went back to the electorate and in a rather amazing display of political humility said, ‘we don’t like the old system. We think it should be replaced by something else but we’re not sure what with. Please help us figure out a new way.’
Public discussions were held and what came out of these discussions was the birth of the ‘participative budget’. (Please understand that my comments are by necessity very general and I don’t pretend to have the last word or even the most accurate word on the participative budget. One of the difficulties in visiting Porto Alegre is that no one speaks English. English is a very distant language for the Brazilians. They have about the same relationship to it as we do to Russian. They know it’s out there somewhere but there is no connection to it. I did not find one person in eight days from Porto Alegre including hotel clerks who could speak English. Even ordering food in a restaurant took a fair bit of ingenuity. All my knowledge was picked up from translated documents and translated conversations. Hence, I am in no way pretending to give you anything more than a simplistic outline of what actually happens during the participative budget process.)
Participative Budget: The broad strokes
Essentially, what the participative budget does is take the city staff process that we have in Canada and simply throw it open to the public. Instead of staff evaluating and negotiating behind closed doors, they take their very preliminary documents to the public in March and the public discussion begins. The planning cycle is ten months, it begins in March and finishes with the document rising to City Council in December. January and February are summer months in Porto Alegre and rest months for both the population and city council, similar to our July and August.
It is interesting what they call the Porto Alegre city budget document. They call it the 2002 City Investment and Service Plan document. This may seem trivial but the word budget doesn’t appear anywhere. The whole budget process begins on a different premise that I am used to in Ottawa. What I am used to in Ottawa during our budget process is tremendous preoccupation with ‘saving’ money.
In Ottawa, we begin with a financial envelope of X dollars of Capital and Y dollars of Operating funds and then the budget exercise is to shoe horn all the essential services and most pressing capital demands into that envelope size. At the end of the day, all the media is really interested in is ‘did you make it?’ Did you force the city’s expenditures into the budget envelope and if you didn’t how much did you take from the Reserves? Or deficit finance? Or what project did you cut? The budget process is all about the money envelope; the service and community investment side of the budget appears almost as an after thought. I have never seen a single editorial or columnist in the Ottawa press talking about the benefits of say investment in public transit versus roads.
In Porto Alegre, they start the budget debate from the other end of the equation. What services do people want? What new expenditures do people want? This is the primary preoccupation of the public process – to identify each ward’s priorities and the overall city priorities. The participative budget process doesn’t have the say on what priorities will be approved or even how much money will be raised by the city to pay for the priorities identified, this all remains with the elected council. But what the participative budget does is identify the priorities and the distribution of those priorities across the city and within each ward.
As one of the citizens on the citizen panel that I attended said, ‘we still have industries which pollute in Porto Alegre. We still have a problem with urban poverty. The participative budget hasn’t solved all our problems, but it has made the budget system more transparent, more honest, more equitable and there is more confidence that our tax dollars are getting spent on what people want, not what someone in authority thinks will be good for us.
As an example of equity, he pointed out that Porto Alegre had the opposite problem from the city of Ottawa and most Canadian cities that I am familiar with, the bulk of the annual city allocations flowed into central city neighbourhoods. Suburban areas were much poorer and less well served with even basic services like sanitation and piped water. And you certainly can see that in Porto Alegre. The entire central areas of the city are delightful. They are blessed with many parks, elegant, generous streetscapes and the public spaces are all beautifully maintained. .
After 12 years of ‘participative budget, the basic services to the population have grown impressively. The number of children in school has doubled. Daycares have grown from 2 to 120. Homes with sanitation from 46 per cent to 85 per cent between 1989 and 1999. 25 kilometers of new road have been added. Sewage treatment from 2 per cent to 26 per cent.
Their public transit system is especially impressive, a fully integrated system from light, electric rail, to articulated buses on busways, shoulder lanes, mid-sized buses, small buses, air conditioned, comfortable, 95 cents to use. The effectiveness of this system was evident in the usage. The buses were busy all day. Everyone used them. I could only find three parking lots in the downtown, although there must have been more. And people were on the bus not because they were poor, Porto Alegre is a very middle class city, larger than Edmonton or Ottawa at 1.3 million but similar in neighbourhoods, universities, hospitals, businesses. Alegrans used the bus system simply because it was less hassle than driving your own vehicle to your destination. Curiously, nighttime seemed to see more cars on the street. The private car in Porto Alegre seemed more like a social accouterment than a necessity.
The demands for city services are so strong and clear from the Algerian population that the city has raised more taxes through a real estate tax, similar to our development charges and through small regular increases in property taxes.
These are very big accomplishments. The size of them can be appreciated when one learns although the participative budget was only born 12 years ago, in 12 years it has spread to 200 Brazilian municipalities, including most recently Sao Paulo. It is a city of 15 to 17 million people, the biggest city in Brazil and one of the largest on the planet. And councillors sympathetic to the participative budget process have been returned for three successive mandates and it looks like it will be returned for a fourth.