On June 30th EmPaci Interreg Baltic Sea Region project partners met online to discuss the pilot participatory budgets run in Lithuania, Poland and Germany, as well as to share the best practices from the BSR municipalities, where PB already exists.
BISER, coming from Gdynia, Poland shared the best practice from Gdynia Participatory Budget 2020, since the results were announced just couple of days earlier.
You can see the information on the budget and summary of the results below – from the official Gdynia PB website – www.bo.gdynia.pl
PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING 2020 IN GDYNIA
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which residents of Gdynia decide every year what a specific amount of the city budget should be spent on. They come up with and report their ideas which are supposed to improve the quality of life in the city and later vote on those that should be implemented.
Any and all residents of Gdynia are allowed to take part in the PB, regardless of their age, accommodation or citizenship. You just have to be a resident of this city.
Involvement in Participatory Budgeting is an opportunity to become involved in the life of the city and, together with others, to have a direct impact on the way the city changes. For information on their progress, see bo.gdynia.pl (in Polish).
How much money are we talking about?
DISTRICT-LEVEL PROJECTS
For district-level projects you may put forward small initiatives (up to PLN 10 000) and large ones (whose value does not excedd 90% of the total amount for a particular district – district limits for PB can be found here).
CITY-LEVEL PROJECTS
They must be important form the prespective of the entire city, cost no more than PLN 1 million and satisfy the needs of residents of various districts.
What kind of projects can be submitted to the PB?
Projects may be related to areas such as:
- Education (e.g. workshops, regional education)
- Transport and traffic organisation (e.g. bike lanes, road renovations, solutions that calm traffic
- Culture (e.g. festivals, community festivities, artistic programmes, film screenings)
- Environmental protection (e.g. recycling containers, solar panels, bins for dog poop)
- Health and social support (e.g. prophylactic tests, pro-health education, new defibrillatorspromotion of social integration, subsidies for warm meals)
- Public space (e.g. small architecture, decorative elements, lighting, development of yards and squares)
- Sport and recreation (e.g. sport fields, sport activities, acquisition of sporting equipment available to everyone)
- Urban green areas (e.g. planting new trees and bushes, development of parks, seeding lawns and flower meadows)
How to submit a proposal?
District-level projects can be proposed by filling in a submission form, availble online (in Polish), from January 27th until February 24th.
City-level projects will be developed as part of three Saturday workshops. They will be created by residents (max. 100 people, representing various groups of inhabitants, regarding gender, age and place of residence factors) with the support of city officials. You can apply to take part in the workshops (in Polish); applications will be available from January 27th until February 24th.
Voting on proposals
- Will take placefrom June 8th to 22that bo.gdynia.pl.
• You choose city-level projects and those pertaining to the district of your choice (not necessarily the one in which you currently live).
• Choose no more than 3 district-level projects and 3 city-level projects.
The announcement of voting results will take place by June 25th.
- Once the voting is complete, we’ll make a list of selected city-level and district-level projects, both small and large.
• We’ll implement the projects which received the largest support and that can be financed entirely from the PB funds.
• Any unused funds (insufficient to implement another project with the largest support) will be used in the PB in the following year.
The results were announced on 26th June 2020. See the information summary in Polish here https://bo.gdynia.pl/Budzet_Obywatelski_2020:_oto_wyniki_glosowania_.html and the list with the detailed results here: https://bo.gdynia.pl/cms/fck/uploaded/2020-06-25%20wyniki%20g%C5%82osowania.pdf
We recommend reading information booklet which contains complex information about Participatory Budget in Gdynia. Information booklet in PDF is avaliable here.
