First results of the “People’s Budget” project were discussed in Cherepovets

At the Cherepovets city hall, Oleg Kharkhordin, Lev Shilov, Olga Bychkova and Darya Dimke participated in a round table discussion regarding the results of the “People’s Budget,” a project that gives city residents the possibility of participating in the distribution of the city budget.

The “People’s Budget” was launched at the end of April with the support of the Committee of Citizen Initiatives. Its main purpose was to unite the forces of experts, city residents, and city officials to build an infrastructure for public access to decision making (for details, see the book Infrastruktura svobody: obshchie veshchi i res publica [The Infrastructure of Freedom: Public Things and Res Publica. Collective Monograph])

In April, twenty people who did not hold bureaucratic or Duma seats but wishing to take part in local politics were elected. Before them lay the task of agreeing how to spend the fifteen million rubles allocated to the project. As a result of debates, workshops on the structuring of city budgets and a discussion of priorities, the participants agreed that ten million would be spent in outfitting sports fields, and five million would be spent on outfitting the square near the monument to the liquidators of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

“If citizens participate in discussing aspects of budgeting, then some of the questions asked earlier would not be seen by sociologists as a hidden reaction of the population, and would be taken into account in the process of urban planning of the administration,” responded the rector of the European University to the question of why the project was necessary.

In addition to researchers from the European University, the meeting was attended by representatives of the city government such as Yuri Kuzin and his deputy Elena Avdeeva, as well as the CEO of the JSC “Severstal’,” Aleksey Mordashov.

Yuri Kuzin shared his impressions on the ways in which priorities expressed by citizens changed throughout of the project: “It was very interesting to observe the course of the discussion, the consolidation of ideas. At the initial stage, ideas were contributed in a simplified way: let’s direct the entire sum to solving problems in the housing sector. But when participants realized that the funds allocated to the ‘People’s Budget’ were not enough to solve even a small fraction of issues in this area, they then focused their efforts in a social direction.”

The projects selected by citizens will be implemented in 2014.