Submit Your Participatory Budgeting Ideas Online

Last year’s deliberations. Photo credit: Office of Councilmember Brad Lander via Metrofocus

It’s participatory budget season, which means that for the second year in a row, District 39ers get to vote on a million dollar’s worth of community-generated improvement projects. The basic premise: neighbors pitch ideas, hard-core volunteer committees turn the ideas into concrete projects that are actually doable, everybody votes, changes are implemented, utopia now! Or at least, better parks/bike lines/community composting.

You can pitch your ideas at Participatory Budgeting Neighborhood Assemblies — Park Slope’s is October 3rd at Greenwood Baptist Church — but Brad Lander’s office wants to remind everyone that you can ALSO submit your ideas online. You get 200 characters to enter your idea and 200 more to explain why it matters. Add it to the participatory budgeting map, check a few boxes to categorize the project, and you’re done. So far, web-submitted ideas include winterizing the handball courts at Washington Park, installing better lighting around the F/G station at Fort Hamilton Parkway, more trees on Bond Street…the list goes on.

Submissions close October 15th. As with everything participatory budget-related, all district residents can participate, online or IRL, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.