How Would You Spend $1M To Improve Your Neighborhood?

Look around your neighborhood. How would you spend $1 million to improve it?

That’s the question Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell is posing in a pilot project aimed at promoting democracy by getting people more involved in divvying up a portion of the county’s massive $47 billion budget.

Mitchell has taken $1 million out of her discretionary funds and invited residents of the Ladera Heights and Florence-Firestone communities to come up with ideas for how to spend the money. Each community gets $500,000.

People of any age who live or work in those communities are eligible to make suggestions. Only those age 16 and older will be able to vote on which projects to fund.

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This is “real power over real money,” said Megan Castillo, coalition coordinator for the Re-Imagine L.A. Coalition, which is partnering with Mitchell’s office to implement what’s known as a participatory budgeting process.

“The idea is to really build the muscle for co-governance,” she said of the project, and it’s about “deepening democracy.”

Ideas need to align with the county’s Care First models, according to the submission form. The Care First initiative emphasizes “investing in our most marginalized residents and communities, prioritizing care, services, and opportunities over incarceration for those who have long suffered from the injustices of a flawed legal system rooted in racial and economic disparities.”

Ladera Heights and Florence-Firestone each have advisory committees appointed by Mitchell to oversee the process. Each has created a broad priority list of the types of projects for which they would like to receive ideas. They include green and safe infrastructure; housing and homelessness; economic opportunities; and traffic and transportation.

Among the ideas submitted to date: converting vacant lots and underused land into parks and community gardens and creating an urban tree planting program.

Maria Jose Vides, who sits on the advisory committee for Florence-Firestone, said she’s thought a lot about the needs of street vendors in her community. One idea, she said, would focus on “economic development for street vendors to make sure they have the tools they need to scale their businesses.”

Around 70,000 people live in the Florence-Firestone area, which is an unincorporated community tucked above the 105 Freeway in South L.A. Vides said the community is heavily immigrant with a large number of undocumented residents who need assistance.

Florence-Firestone is one of the most economically depressed areas of the county. It has a household median income that is 28% below the county as a whole and nearly 20% of the residents live below the poverty line, according to the L.A County Department of Public Health.

Ladera Heights, by comparison, is a community of about 6,700 with about 7% of the residents living below the poverty line. It sits adjacent to the 405 Freeway above Inglewood and is sometimes referred to as the “Black Beverly Hills.”

"Our office purposefully chose two communities with distinctive differences for our participatory budgeting project," Lenee Richards, a spokesperson for Mitchell, said in an email. "As the first County Supervisor to undertake this pilot, our goal is to gather valuable data that will inform potential expansions to other unincorporated communities in our district."

Vides said the project is a way to share power and respond more immediately to the needs of the community.

“I also think it builds trust” in elected officials, she said.

Vides added that she would like the pilot project expanded countywide so that residents have a bigger and more direct say over county spending priorities.

Mitchell’s staff will review the project ideas and place budget estimates on them. The advisory committees are expected to decide which project ideas will make the ballot for residents to vote on in the fall.

The deadline for submitting ideas is June 15.

The project comes as the Board of Supervisors evaluates a proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1. A special hearing is scheduled for May 15 for the board to hear public input on the plan.