Chicago’s 2026 budget season is in full swing. While the city has taken feedback on what residents would like to see prioritized, on a smaller scale, each alderperson can decide to implement an inclusive process called participatory budgeting to make decisions on how to spend money they receive yearly.
The process allows constituents to vote on how alders use their allocation of $1.5 million in tax dollars, referred to as menu money. All 50 wards receive cash annually for infrastructure projects, such as neighborhood beautification, street resurfacing and creating nature spaces.
Chicago’s 49th Ward on the North Side, which includes Rogers Park, was the first ward in the United States to implement participatory budgeting (also known as “PB”) in 2009. Each alderperson has the discretion to use this process — or not. Each ward also has its own voting schedule for the PB process. Residents may visit their ward website or contact their alderperson to find out more about the voting timeline. The city disburses menu money in January of each year.
Some alders lean on the formal process of constituent voting for ideas on how to spend the money. Others view the participatory process as ongoing, with feedback from community meetings determining how they will prioritize the menu dollars.
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd Ward) has opted not to use the process in her 18 years as alderwoman out of fairness to less-resourced communities in her area, she said in a statement to The TRiiBE:
“Some communities in the ward have limited resources and digital access, and have other barriers to participation, and the result would be menu requests reflecting popular projects, while neglecting larger infrastructure needs,” according to Dowell’s statement. “We base our menu decisions on needs identified by residents and confirmed through technical evaluations by CDOT [Chicago Department of Transportation] and other city agencies. We spread the limited dollars across all the communities of the 3rd Ward.”
Several aldermanic officials — Ald. Jason Ervin (28th Ward), Ald. William Hall (6th Ward) and a 7th Ward representative — echoed Dowell’s rationale.
“I’m not doing it the way other aldermen are doing it, and I’m not defining it like that,” Hall said. “Participatory budgeting, defined by Hall, is to listen in the community meetings to areas of concern, and those concerns are addressed through investment, period.”
These are examples of community engagement, not participatory budgeting, according to Thea Crum, associate director of the Neighborhoods Initiative at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“I just want to be clear about that,” Crum said.
“Participatory budgeting is a very specific process that does end with a vote,” she said. “So generally, the definition of PB that’s accepted, not just here in Chicago, but really kind of across the world, is that it’s when community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget.”
The 29th Ward, which is 43.9% Black, is listed as one of 14 wards that have done participatory budgeting, in the formal sense. Ald. Chris Taliaferro, who oversees the 29th Ward, said he’s done it since he was elected in 2015.
The process has been responsible for beautification in his ward, which includes parts of Austin, Belmont Cragin and Dunning, Taliaferro said. Community members have suggested projects such as murals, recreational facilities and decorative lights under viaducts.
“One of my favorite projects that we were able to do with PB to this day, my second year in office, we created a Veterans Peace Garden,” Taliaferro said.
The Veterans Peace Garden at 5413 W. Madison St. was completed in 2018. The project transformed a vacant lot in Austin into a community garden space. Led by the South Austin Neighborhood Association, the project is an example of how community voices can help bring beautification projects to life.
“When I say that project has spurred a whole lot of engagement, community engagement, community involvement, community meetings … they’re very proud of that garden,” Taliaferro said.
Before becoming the 49th Ward alderwoman in 2019, Maria Hadden worked as an advocate of participatory budgeting, which is how she got her start in civic engagement. She was a volunteer for the ward’s participatory budget process under former longtime Ald. Joe Moore. As a founding member of the nonprofit, the Participatory Budgeting Project, Hadden worked for a decade introducing the process to community organizations and elected officials in the Midwest and South.
In Chicago, Hadden has helped other alders, such as Taliaferro and David Moore (17th Ward), start PB processes. Other majority-Black wards that have done participatory budgeting in the past include the 5th Ward, during Leslie Hairston’s 24-year tenure. In 2025, there are 16 majority-Black wards in total.
The 27th Ward, overseen by Ald. Walter Burnett (who plans to resign at the end of July) introduced the inclusive process for allocating $2 million in tax increment funding (TIF) in 2014. Money has been set aside for a skate park in West Humboldt Park that has yet to be completed, he said.
The 27th Ward was once predominantly Black but has undergone remapping and other changes over the years, such as the demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project and hosting both the 1996 and 2024 Democratic National Conventions. It’s now 46.5% white and encompasses the communities of East Garfield Park, Garfield Park, Near West Side, West Town, Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park and the Near North Side. Burnett said he began seeing the demographic change in his ward roughly 10-15 years ago.
City Council members have complex reasons for not partaking in participatory budgeting, Hadden said.
“Whether [it’s a] majority-Black ward or not, it’s a lot of work,” she said. “So sometimes it’s hard for new alders. Sometimes it’s hard when we’re facing a lot of competing priorities.”
Hadden recalled a 17th Ward community meeting where a community member’s needs were still being unmet and he spoke up: “I will never forget an elderly man saying, ‘Why do I have to tell the city to repave my street that they haven’t resurfaced for, like, 20 years?’”
Ald. Ronnie Mosley (21st Ward) notes the reason Black wards don’t go through this process is they don’t often have discretionary funds. Many Black alders already know how they are going to spend the $1.5 million in menu money, he said. For Mosley, that means investing in damaged streets, which he said take up the bulk of the money.
“I don’t have the luxury of focusing on [things] like a dog park or items like that because literally, everyone wants and needs new streets,” Mosley said. “Their cars are being damaged from them driving on their streets.”
Mosley’s ward includes the South Side communities of West Pullman, Morgan Park, Washington Heights and Auburn Gresham, and is 92% Black. His sentiment was echoed by Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward), who also said she is focused on distributing her menu money equitably across all parts of her ward to fix streets.
“I try to make sure I do two to three streets in every part of the ward that I represent, [to] look at what’s in the worst conditions and then go from there,” Taylor said. She added that cultivating relationships with county and state officials has helped generate more money for street upkeep.
According to Hadden, the city’s history of disinvestment plays into the structural makeup of wards and affects the way alders have to use menu money. This is highlighted by differences she’s seen while working with different wards to set up their participatory budgeting processes.
“When we’re talking about infrastructure, Chicago has such a history of inequality in infrastructure services, and there’s also the differences in our ward shapes,” Hadden explained. “But because everything is related to our kind of racial segregation and history, you’re going to find a correlation to majority-Black wards on that front, too.”
The city’s largest ward by square miles is the 10th ward, according to Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development. The ward is majority-Hispanic and encompasses the Far South Side neighborhood of Altgeld Gardens, and the East Side areas of Hegewisch and Jeffrey Manor.
“Some of our Far South Side wards are really geographically big, but they get the same amount of money as some of the wards that are really geographically small,” Hadden said.
“So I’m not the smallest,” Hadden added, “but I’m in like the top three smallest wards. When it comes to how many miles of street, how many miles of alley, those residential things that I’m responsible for through the aldermanic menu, I have less of it, which means that I can cover proportionally more of my ward every time I’m doing these improvements.”
Paving maps show roads that are potential candidates for paving or rehabilitation, with priority based on the condition of the street. These maps feature color indicators of orange for “poor” and red for “very poor.”
“We’re gonna need more funding,” said Mosley, evoking the challenges of longtime former alders: “Carrie Austin was in office for almost 30 years. Howard Brookins was in office for almost 20 years. I could be here as long as either one of them and would not be able to resurface my entire ward.”
Paving maps Mosley provided The TRiiBE also show where city departments are expected to do work that involves digging into streets, which Mosley said he follows to prioritize where he will do resurfacing projects.
“We have really good, clear pathways that we can communicate to residents that we can check in regularly with the departments on their progress,” he said. “The money that we have doesn’t go far enough. That’s why there was a petition process in the past that really was, I would argue, the first participatory budgeting.”
Mosley said residents would come in or petition for their block to be resurfaced, or for some other capital improvement, saying, “Hey, this is the priority of our block.”
Taylor’s South Side ward includes parts of Englewood, Woodlawn, New City and Washington Park, and is 67% Black. Taylor said another reason she isn’t doing participatory budgeting is due to who it will reach.
“The squeaky wheel will get the oil. And so for me, it would be Woodlawn and some parts of Washington Park because of relationships. They’ll show up; they’ll come to the meeting,” according to Taylor, who said she advocates for those who may not show up for meetings. “I know Woodlawn gon’ show up, and so I make sure I equitably do streets, or I try to anyway, for folks who call me and show up.”
In the 35th Ward, which began doing PB in 2015 and includes Logan Square, Irving Park and Avondale, “initially more affluent, white residents were overrepresented in community meetings, which is a common issue in many communities,” according to a Participatory Budget Project case study.
Taliaferro said taking suggestions from his constituents in 2024 to divide his ward into three sections of north, south and central helped to make the process more inclusive.
“Each section is given a certain amount of money for the participatory budgeting process, and we have section leads,” Taliaferro said. “And so those section leads are responsible for gathering information, gathering projects, holding meetings. And that has worked very well for my ward.”
Crum says concerns related to infrastructure are valid, but another way alders can implement PB in their wards is through allowing constituents to vote on policy, which is less difficult than trying to divvy up menu money.
Hadden has implemented voting feedback on what policies she focuses on in the 49th ward within her participatory budgeting process.
“She’s having them think about what her policy focus should be for the year,” Crum explained. “And that’s another way that they may not have heard of, that they could implement a kind of participatory decision-making process in their wards that might be a little bit easier.”
