Thank you to everyone who voted in this year’s People’s Budget! This year, more people than ever used their voice to tell us how to spend $1M in infrastructure funds, at 2,219 total votes.
Here are the results:
Of the $1 million that neighbors voted on how to spend, 60.14% will go to fund repairs, vs. 39.86% for new infrastructure projects.
Here are the winning projects, ranked from the most votes to the least.
- Chappell Elementary Accessible Playground Equipment: $170K
- Pedestrian Safety Improvements at Lawrence and Washtenaw: $90K
- Pedestrian Safety Improvements at Peterson and Maplewood: $90K
- River Park Viaduct Mural: $40K
Congratulations to Chappell Elementary, our winning project! We will move forward on this project immediately, but we also hope to fund as many of the runner-ups as possible with the remaining $398,601 that neighbors voted to spend on new projects.
How we calculated the results
To determine how much to spend on repairs vs. new projects, we calculate the average percentage of all the neighbors’ votes. We use rank choice voting to determine the winning projects. Neighbors rank each of the projects in order of importance. Each ranking has a point value (6 for 1st place, 5 for 2nd place, 4 for 3rd place, 3 for 4th place, 2 for 5th place, and 1 for 6th place). Once all the votes are in, we tally the points for each project to determine the winning project(s)!
Timeline + Next Steps
Now that you’ve done your job by casting your vote, it’s time for us to do our jobs to make these projects happen! In the coming weeks, our team will reach out to the appropriate departments to ask them to survey and provide updated estimates and timelines for each of the winning projects. We will fund as many of the top projects as we can with the funds that neighbors voted to spend on new infrastructure!
In the meantime, we will be reviewing repair requests over the next few weeks, so we can determine which repair requests to spend with the $600K we have to spend on repairs this year. If there is a repair you want to see in your neighborhood, submit a repair request ASAP! We typically send our list of requested repairs to the Department of Transportation (CDOT) by the end of January.