Eau Claire, a city of 66,000 in western Wisconsin, has just put up an online calculator of sorts that asks residents how they’d spend an imaginary half-thousand dollars on city services. The point, says the city council, is to help it understand how to plan the city’s forthcoming budget, totaling about $132 million.
Five hundred bucks is a bit easier to wrap one’s mind around, and one particularly neat feature is that the site, based on a platform called Peak Democracy, surfaces how the city is already divvying up that play money. Some $13 of it, for example, will fund the city’s 1,000 acres of parkland and 21 miles of recreational trails. Meanwhile, a full fifth of it — $100 — will pay for the 100-strong Eau Claire Police Department.
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.