While Boston made history in 2021 by electing the first women and first person of color as mayor of Boston with a thumping majority, an even greater majority of voters supported a binding ballot question that greatly expanded the City Council's formal budget powers. The vote also created a participatory budgeting process.

As Boston begins its third budget procedure since that ballot question passed the participatory part of the process is still in the planning stage. Changes sought by the process’s strongest community advocates have been repeatedly rejected by the Wu administration, and major differences between Boston and communities where the program has been successful have emerged.

What is participatory budgeting? Here is how Tony Saich, the director at Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, defines it: “Participatory budgeting refers to processes through which citizens help to decide how to allocate public monies, empowering them to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals, and vote on how to spend public funds.”

This process has been implemented by thousands of local governments in Europe and almost 200 local governments in Canada and the United States, including two of Boston’s neighbors, Somerville and Cambridge. The best-known example is Paris, which devotes 5 percent of its capital fund – more than $30 million a year – to participatory budgeting.

A significant factor in Paris’s success has been the support of the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who is best known for closing large swaths of her city to car traffic, a policy that bubbled up from the participatory budgeting process.

Mayoral support was also important closer to home in Somerville, where Joe Curtatone launched participatory budgeting. There the program was part of his aggressive experimentation with innovative urban governance, which also included one of the nation’s first 311 programs and a famously vigilant parking enforcement office.

Boston has been slow to implement participatory budgeting, so it remains to be seen if the program will enjoy the same success as it has in Paris or Somerville. The Wu administration proposed an ordinance to create the Office of Participatory Budgeting in December 2022, more than a year after voters approved the ballot question, and efforts by advocates and city councillors to make changes to the ordinance failed.

In last year’s process Wu vetoed a proposal to increase participatory budgeting’s budget from $2 million to $10 million. A board for the office itself was not appointed until November 2023, nine months after the ordinance was passed. The board’s first meeting was held in December, more than two years after voters approved the ballot question.

Participatory budgeting’s slow rollout is not for a lack of community support. After the ballot question was passed in 2021 the Better Budget Alliance – a coalition that includes many of Boston’s broad array of progressive organizations, including progressive issue advocacy groups, community development corporations, and activist membership groups – was organized and since its launch BBA and its coalition members have pursued the goal of creating an ambitious and muscular participatory budget process through community organizing and education and direct participation in the city’s legislative and budget processes.

After suffering defeats of efforts to amend the ordinance and spend more in 2023, BBA’s work in 2024 faces new challenges, with Boston grappling with declining commercial property tax revenue and a proposed tax increase.

That hasn’t dissuaded the alliance from aiming high. The group recently laid out its demands for this year’s budget process in a letter signed by 40 Boston community leaders. The major item is a $40 million allotment for participatory budgeting in the upcoming FY25 budget. BBA also delivered hundreds of postcards from residents who want to see a well-funded participatory budget process.

Add participatory budgeting to the council’s increasingly crowded dance card as the 2024 budget process officially gets underway.

Gregory Maynard is the executive director of the Boston Policy Institute, Inc, a recently launched non-profit corporation focused on the issues facing Massachusetts and Boston. Find out more at BostonPolicyInstitute.org.