At Timothy Park in Bordeaux, the basketball courts pop with fresh blue paint. The large walking path is re-paved and smooth. And there’s a new playground — a towering climbing structure, swirling slides and swings.
On a brisk afternoon in September, Jamelia, who lives nearby, lets her puppy run around. She remembers how rundown the park used to look.
“It was kind of breathtaking to come, honestly,” Jamelia says. “That’s why we pulled up. We were going somewhere and I was like, ‘Let’s stop over there.’ ”
The park renovations were one of two dozen projects funded through what’s known as “participatory budgeting,” or “PB.” It’s a process where residents identify neighborhood needs, ranging from traffic bumps to apprenticeship programs to musical instruments for the library branch. Then people vote for which projects get Metro tax dollars.
More: Nashville’s participatory budgeting process is at a crossroads.
While Jamelia is excited about the renovations — “this neighborhood was definitely due for an upgrade,” she says — she didn’t vote for them.
Like most people, she hadn’t heard of the participatory budgeting process. And now Metro has discontinued it, leaving questions about how PB was carried out and what other avenues residents can use to guide city spending decisions.
The PB experiment
Four years ago, Nashville launched PB with $2 million for areas of North Nashville.
At first, it had a lot of hype around it. City leaders like District 2 Councilmember Kyonzté Toombs rallied behind the concept.
“I felt like it worked really well,” Toombs said. “My constituents were very involved.”
Later, in 2023, Metro scaled up the project, setting aside $10 million for projects anywhere in the city. That’s just a sliver of the city’s total annual budget, which, this year, added up to $3.8 billion.
Still, more than 1,300 project ideas were submitted. Those were whittled down to 35 (one for each council district), and voters, through an online form, decided on which of these 35 projects would win funding.
But engagement was low: roughly 13,000 people voted. That’s less than 2% of Nashville’s total population, even though participatory budgeting is open to people who aren’t typically eligible to vote, including undocumented residents, kids as young as 14 and otherwise disenfranchised voters.
When Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell took office in 2023, he saw that the 24 winning projects got funded — and then promptly phased out further participatory budgeting rounds.
What went wrong?
“Is this really participatory in the way that we’re hoping it would be?” O’Connell says. “It seemed like we were asking people in communities that might need more resources than they’ve historically had access to do more work for things that they should be getting ordinarily anyway, right?”
O’Connell has expressed skepticism since his early days in office. And his complaint is a common one about PB: that it’s making people work for dollars on projects that simply deserve funding.
But champions of the idea, like Dr. Celina Su, a professor at the City University of New York who studies PB, say it’s about something bigger than each project.
“It’s supposed to be a boot camp for helping people to talk with others about community needs, advocate for them and start to hold officials accountable between elections,” Su says.
At its best, PB can lead to accountability and efficiency, she says.
“Programs funded by PB are ones that point to pressing needs — so they might be ones that city agencies would have funded anyway, but now with more community input for implementation, built-in support, and community buy-in,” she says.
To Su, the fact that Nashville’s process is gone is evidence that the process wasn’t done right.
“It wasn’t big enough for people to really notice,” Su says. “You have to make sure that it’s something that’s going to be missed.”
Different people have different ideas about what went wrong. Whitney Pastorek, who served for as the chair of the participatory budgeting steering committee for three months before stepping down, points to a “compressed timeline.” Jason Sparks, who replaced Pastorek as chair, says that the mayoral transition was the “No. 1 reason” for low engagement.
“It felt like it was an orphaned project of the previous administration rather than something that had been green-lit by the Metro Council and was supposed to carry forward into the next administration,” Sparks said.
Even without PB, there’s still widespread agreement that it’s one way to incorporate voices that aren’t usually heard. And that’s a change that some advocates feel Nashville needs — even if it takes another form.
Upending the process
The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition was not a part of Metro’s PB process, even though they’ve been working for years to transform Metro’s budgeting process into a more participatory model.
“In this day and age right now, we need processes that are more participatory and more democratic,” organizer Theeda Murphy says. “We really do not, as a community, as a city, have any say in what’s happening.”
The group, which emerged in 2019, takes Metro’s dense financial documents and turns them into handy guides. They also mobilize mass amounts of people to show up and advocate for changes to the budget. This year, their agenda included an innovative “social housing” project and a non-police community safety plan.
The coalition feels the budget process is fundamentally stacked against them: they think the mayor has too much say, the council not enough, and that there’s not enough time for officials to listen to the people.
Metro’s budget process originates with the mayor, who files a budget ordinance by April 30. Part of this budget relies on fiscal information from the state, which is delivered that month. Members of the Metro Council have the opportunity to provide “substitute” budgets, making alterations to the city spending. However, the council has to approve a substitute — with a majority vote — before the end of June. Otherwise, the mayor’s proposal takes effect.
Within that time frame, in June, the Metro Council holds a budget public hearing for residents to share their wishes and suggestions. However, Nashville People’s Budget Coalition organizers feel this is too little, too late.
“It ends up being fairly symbolic because the real decisions get made before the city ever hears from the public in a lot of ways,” says organizer Andrew Krinks.
The group did influence this year’s budget a little: the council allocated $100,000 toward the innovative housing project. The council also made changes in response to other residents who showed up, including an increase to the cost of living adjustment for Metro employees. In the 2024 substitute budget, the council allocated $1 million toward the “Varsity Spending Plan,” a restorative justice and violence prevention proposal.
Still, the coalition is reaching an inflection point:
“Year after year of showing up in force has not — it has shifted the discourse around budgeting, around how much police get,” Krinks says. “But it hasn’t equated yet to real tangible, significant shifts in resources across the budget. “
Metro leaders say they care about public input. Councilmembers seek out opinions. The mayor says he’s incorporating citywide engagement into his plans. And, in recent years, the Metro Council has added a “pre-budget” public hearing earlier: in February.
But the direct spending decisions of participatory budgeting are off the table, leaving it unclear just how participatory Metro’s budget process can be for residents.
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