When Hector Ricardo Silva was elected mayor of El Salvador’s capital of San Salvador three years ago, he was anxious to fulfill one of his main campaign promises: to launch a system of direct citizen participation in city government. Unfortunately, he says, “we didn’t have a clear idea of what citizen participation was.”

Mayor of San Salvador, Héctor Ricardo Silva (Photo: Rocha)

So with financial help from the Swedish government and the IDB, Silva sent a team of officials to Porto Alegre, Brazil, where citizens have participated in the budget process since 1989. Though he was convinced he could put many of the concepts of the Porto Alegre experience to work in his city, Silva decided on a gradual approach, in part because of the need to build up managerial skills of city officials.

Like other mayors, Silva cautions that participatory budgeting is not a cure-all, but rather just one tool for coping with the daunting fiscal challenges facing Latin America’s cities. Indeed, he says it can be meaningless for citizens to go to assemblies and list their priorities for public works if there is no money in the treasury to pay for them. “To get money,” he says, “we need to reform municipal finances.”

To that end, Silva has pushed measures to boost efficiency and increase tax collection. He began by setting up a task force to collect $267 million in debts owed to the city. “We were able to collect about half,” he says. “The rest of the debt was from businesses that no longer existed, or from persons who had died.” The next step was to modernize the city’s cadastre, or list of taxpayers, using technology such as aerial photos to identify buildings subject to property taxes. Finally, the city has privatized some public services and awarded a number of concessions and build-operate-transfer contracts for others.

Although revenues have grown by 30 percent, they still fall short of Silva’s goals. The problem, he says, is a combination of overly complex tax regulations and a failure to collect many types of revenue. The city does not collect property taxes or fees for city space that is used by utilities and other service providers, for example.

Silva and others have proposed that the national legislative assembly overhaul the tax system, but their efforts have failed. “We’re stuck,” says Silva.

New priorities. Despite these limitations, San Salvador’s experiment with participatory budgeting has led to notable changes. In the past, City Council sessions were closed to the press and minutes were not even published, making it difficult for citizens to determine what investment priorities were being considered.

But now, participatory budgeting has exposed new types of local investment priorities that were previously ignored. The first priority is the construction of retaining walls. The reason, explains Silva, is that poor people tend to live along the steep banks of rivers, where they are periodically at risk from flooding and landslides. A second priority is “common space,” where people can meet. A third priority is crime prevention, with a focus on youth, an area in which the IDB is providing financial assistance.

Although many citizens are participating in the popular assemblies, Silva is concerned that not all groups are involved. The challenge, he says, is to make sure the meetings are “much more than a convocation of the party [in power]” and to “promote participation of the middle class.” Getting the middle class to attend is a major problem, he says. People from that social segment tend not to like the crowds and noise at the large assemblies and are often uncomfortable in associating with the poor.

Silva has tackled the problem by organizing smaller gatherings that deal with specific subject areas. One topic that proved particularly attractive to the middle class is parks and recreation, he says.

—Daniel Drosdoff

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