"I appreciate that the compromise was given a lot of careful thought and was put together with the active participation of the ward 2 neighbourhood associations, but the way it was presented to voters made it all but a foregone conclusion and IMHO somewhat undercut the democratic spirit of the budget vote. My suggestion for next year is to consider refraining from preselecting a slate and just letting voters individually decide which projects to fund. It would be interesting to see what gets funded if people are not being directed."
Agreed, absolutely. As encouraging as the PB session was, it was also part of an ongoing experiment, and as such bears scrutiny and constructive criticism.
There are about 33,000 residents of Ward 2 above age 14 and eligible to vote in the PB process. I would hazard to guess that only a fraction of those are active members of a neighbourhood association. Of those that are NA members, how many participated in any meaningful way with a delegate assembly's selection process?
Absent that, how many voters were able to make an informed choice based on the thumbnail sketch provided on the ballot, and how many simply defaulted to the compromise?