The petition would allow Portlanders to decide together how to spend a portion of the City of Portland’s budget. This delegates real power over real money to you to propose, develop, and vote on solutions facing your communities.

The six steps of the process are:

1) A representative steering committee designs the process rules

2) Community members dream up and share ideas for projects

3) Proposals are created from those ideas

4) The community votes

5) The city implements winning projects

6) The process is evaluated, improved, and repeated.

Watch this video to learn how participatory budgeting works.

Since 2011 Portlanders have advocated for a city wide community led budgeting process, which already has been implemented in every other major West Coast City. Despite this, the Portland City Council never launched a program. In 2018, the Oregon Commission on Black Affairs urged State and local governments to launch participatory budgeting. In 2022, Representative Ruiz, Senator Jama, and Senator Gorsek decided to allocate $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds in their East Portland districts towards a youth-led participatory budgeting process. Because of this, Youth Voice, Youth Vote was launched by a coalition of culturally specific, and youth-centered organizations to help facilitate Oregon’s first youth-led participatory budgeting process.

In 2022, the Portland Charter Commission responded to community demands and proposed a measure mandating the City implement an annual participatory budgeting process with a minimum portion of the budget. The proposal was sent to the current City Council in January 2023, but the Council did not act to send the proposed charter amendment to the voters. After years of community advocacy, talk, research, and policy discussions but no concrete action by elected officials, the Community Budgeting For All campaign will take participatory budgeting directly to the voters and ensure Portlanders have a direct voice and vote over how City funds are spent.

All Portlanders deeply care about our city and want to help create shared solutions to the many issues our region is facing. Yet, the lack of transparency, accountability, and equity in Portland’s public budgeting process continues to leave Portlanders out of the decision-making room, especially Black, Indigenous, communities of color, and low-income communities. Through a community budgeting process open to all residents we can finally correct course. Ensuring Portlanders can have a direct voice and vote in the decisions that are made about our communities, improve collaboration and trust between city staff and communities, and hold our lawmakers accountable.

Since 2009, over a dozen municipalities in the United States have held participatory budgeting cycles, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Vallejo. Worldwide it has been used in thousands of cities since the process emerged in Brazil in the late 1980’s as an anti-poverty measure. The United Nations has named it as a best practice of democratic governance.

Portland remains the only major West Coast city - from LA to Vancouver BC - without a public participatory budgeting process. Yet, some Portlanders have already participated in allocating public funds. In 2022, Representative Ruiz, Senator Jama, and Senator Gorsek decided to allocate $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds in their East Portland districts towards a youth-led participatory budgeting process. Because of this, Youth Voice, Youth Vote was launched by a coalition of culturally specific, and youth-centered organizations to help facilitate Oregon’s first youth-led participatory budgeting process.

The proposed Charter Amendment is complementary to the new form of government by allowing participatory budgeting to take place citywide or in new City Council Districts. The proposed amendment gives ample time for the city to hire staff and develop the program.

No, the initiative petition does not create new taxes or fees. It requires that the City develop a process to allocate a small portion of the general discretionary funds (mostly existing property taxes) through a participatory budgeting process. Other than an estimated $1 million for implementing the City-run process to allow residents to decide, these funds remain part of the overall City to fund Bureaus to implement projects selected by residents.

Apart from the ~$1 million to implement the process, all funds allocated by residents will go back to the City Bureaus to implement projects or investments residents select. The amendment doesn’t change the amount of available funds to conduct City operations, it just changes who decides how to allocate a small part of those funds. The City General Fund is projected to grow from almost $700 to over $800 million by fiscal year 2027-28, with 98% of the budget directed by the City Council.

Participatory budgeting is the world’s fastest-spreading form of participatory democracy. It is now implemented by thousands of governments across the globe and in dozens of municipalities in the United States. In the United States, over 66% of voters in both New York and Boston have voted to put it in their municipal charters.

We need voter-approved, charter-mandated participatory budgeting in Portland for at least three reasons.

First, participatory budgeting is about the distribution of power between elected officials and their constituents, not about prescribing policy outcomes. Public officials have a conflict of interest in deciding if and how much of the City budget is allocated by residents through participatory budgeting.

Second, research around the globe demonstrates that participatory budgeting’s impacts are more transformative where the process is implemented consistently over numerous cycles with sufficient sums of money, at least $1 million per 100,000 residents.

Third, we need to ensure that participatory budgeting is open to all residents. The petition would include about 150,000 to 170,000 people who are currently excluded from elections, ensuring that all members of our community can help decide where city resources should go, regardless of age and citizenship status.