Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Mapping a Local Budget Plan: Why
and How?
Anja Reinermann-Matatko
Mapping a Local Budget Plan: Why?
Within the project “GeoBudgeting”, the local budget plan of the city of Trier is
georeferenced and mapped. The aim of the author is to offer the local decision
makers (citizens, city councilors and employees of the local authority) decision
support by pushing forward the spatial dimension which is by now implicitly
hidden in the local budget plan.
In the first part, the study investigates the decision criteria of local decision
makers within the process of establishing a local budget plan. As the author knows
from her own experience as city councilor, decisions of local politicians are often
influenced by various factors, and far from being able to be measured objectively.
In this sense, Andrews (
2007
, p. 161) concludes that “Policy decisions should be
rational but sometimes they are not”. Special attention in this study is put on the
existence of spatial decision criteria in stakeholders
reasoning.
Establishing a local budget plan is the most important decision of a city council.
Every project a city wants to realize in the forthcoming years has to be integrated
within the local budget plan. Many communities in Germany are short of revenues
and therefore have to restrict themselves when taking decisions about investments.
During the process of establishing a local budget plan, many discussions take place
between the involved actor groups. Since around 15 years, in many cities world-
wide not only city councilors and employees of the local authority take part in these
discussion processes, but also “normal” citizens: cities offer them the possibility to
discuss the local budget plan within the process of establishing a participatory
budget plan; which is, in most cases, strongly linked to the whole budget plan
process.
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