City councillors make a show of asking people for their views on where to spend public money. And then they make the decisions by themselves.

Not this weekend.

In a kind of political experiment, Councillor Shelley Carroll has invited residents of her North York ward to come to a community centre on Saturday and Sunday to vote on how to allocate $500,000 she secured from a condo developer.

This “Section 37” money is usually divided among local projects by the councillor alone. Carroll, though, is attempting to prove a point: “the world will not end” if Toronto uses participatory budgeting, an increasingly popular 25-year-old system that allows citizens to do the dividing.

Members of council in New York City and Chicago each get a pot of money to spend on local projects. Since 2010, some of them have voluntarily surrendered their spending privileges to their constituents.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called participatory budgeting “the wave of the future.” Carroll wants to bring it here. She plans to ask the next Toronto mayor to agree to give each councillor his or her own spending fund — on the condition that the money must be distributed through local votes.

“I’m using Section 37 funds now. But that’s not my endgame,” she says.

Carroll is limiting her pilot project to the approximately 3,000 people who live in the vicinity of the proposed condo-and-retail development at Sheppard Ave. E. and Consumers Rd.They will get to vote for three projects from a list of seven options pitched by residents who attended a series of community meetings.

The choices: a pavilion for Clydesdale Park ($150,000), landscaping and street improvements for Brian Dr. ($40,000); a “digital innovation hub” for Pleasant View Library ($75,000); an “exercise trail” with new fitness equipment ($100,000); an off-leash dog park for Van Horne Park ($50,000); a seasonal skateboard park ($100,000); basketball pads for 3-on-3 play ($35,000).

Turnout for participatory budgeting tends to be very low compared to regular elections, though much higher than for typical public meetings. Josh Lerner, executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, says 4 per cent turnout is “the highest we’ve seen in the U.S.”

Advocates nonetheless argue that participatory budgeting is fairer than decisions made only be a councillor and influenced only by well-connected people. And they say the process strengthens local democracy. The chance to decide how tax dollars are spent, Lerner says, tends to attract residents who do not usually take part in the political process.

“I think it has alleviated some of the cynicism that people feel toward government, that government doesn’t listen to them,” says Chicago alderman Joe Moore, who pioneered participatory budgeting in the U.S. in 2010.

“It’s their money and they are spending it. That’s the real tool here,” says Carroll. “That’s what make people come to the process who never come to meetings. They came for this. ‘Oh, you’re spending real money?’ ”

The concept is not foreign to Toronto: Toronto Community Housing tenants have done participatory budgeting since 2001, and Councillor Josh Matlow did it with Section 37 money in 2012. But some councillors are likely to oppose the idea of giving each ward a discretionary budget. The budget chief, Councillor Frank Di Giorgio, says government experts are best positioned to decide where city funding is most urgently required.

“One thing that all cities experience is a shortage of funds. What happens with a shortage of funds is that you basically say you can’t meet everybody’s needs. And that’s why you have centralized budgeting, because on a city-wide basis, priorities need to be determined,” Di Giorgio says.

More than 1,700 people cast ballots in Moore’s fifth annual participatory process in Chicago’s Rogers Park area. He asks residents to vote first on what percentage of a $1 million pot to devote exclusively to roads, sidewalks and lighting — the ward settled on 69 per cent this year — and then to pick their favourite ways to spend the rest.

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Moore, first elected in 1991, says he once used his discretionary budget to pay for traditional infrastructure. Since he launched his participatory process, his constituents have also funded a wide variety of other initiatives: community gardens, showers for a local beach, murals for dingy underpasses.

“The projects that have been proposed are much more reflective of the needs and desires of the people I represent,” Moore says.

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