I read the international press a lot. And, occasionally, I come across something in the "Why can't we do that here?" category.

It was the latter I hit a few days ago with an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, the headline and subhead of which pretty much sum it up: "Voters to get direct say on local spending; Cash for schemes such as parks, litter and Asbos to be decided by ballot."

Now, I have no idea what "Asbos" means--I'm sure some Anglophile reader will educate me--but you get the idea. The Communities Secretary under the new government of Gordon Brown has introduced the plan, based on a model first developed nearly 20 years ago in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. It has become popular in Latin America, and is now spreading, apparently, to Europe.

The Guardian describes the British scheme thusly: "In a potentially dramatic extension of direct democracy, councils will have to hold ballots before deciding where money should be targeted. It would mean that, for the first time, people could direct cash to areas that concern them most, such as parks, curbing antisocial behaviour, targeting drug trouble spots or cleaning up litter ... communities will be asked to take control of council budgets through local debates, neighbourhood votes and public town meetings...."

In this country, such a scheme would be dramatic indeed--and with federal money, as Britain is doing, it would also be unconstitutional. Congress (given its 50,000 or so lobbyist friends inside the Beltway alone, and its constant need to fundraise for the next election) isn't about to give up its prerogative to appropriate money in the most politically expedient ways possible, public policy good be damned.

Thus, at the federal level, you get a whopping disconnect between what voters want their taxes to be spent on and where the money actually goes. Over the years, various activist groups in town have conducted, usually around Tax Day, something called a "Penny Poll," in which passersby are given ten (or whatever) pennies and a few jars (military, health care, education, infrastructure, etc.) and told to allocate them as they would like them to be spent. The results at day's end are usually diametrically opposite to how the federal budget actually looks--human needs get far more from the citizenry, and the military gets far less. (In the real world, past and current military spending eats up over half the discretionary funds in the federal budget.) Similar exercises, incidentally, also show that many people don't know that we spend so much on the military and so little on things like welfare and foreign aid.

But that's at the federal level. There's no reason a local body--like, say, the city council in Seattle--couldn't adopt the Porto Alegre model. Rather than Greg Nickels deciding which parks to commercialize, neighborhoods might prioritize particular parks. If a community feels that SPD needs more resources to clean up a block in their area, they can directly fund it. And so on.

As it now stands, relatively few Seattleites can even name who's on the city council, much less who chairs what committees or what sort of political sausage-making goes into the annual budget. Only a handful of us ever get actively involved in determining how our local taxes are spent. At the state level, where part-time legislators (and their lobbyist friends) slap together a budget every two years, the process is even less responsive to community needs. The Porto Alegre model is radically democratic in two ways--both because it's more responsive to community needs and because it gets people involved in the process.

Could Seattle ever adopt something like this? It would require a mayor and city council willing to give up some of their fiscal power--something few politicians would be willing to do. (Just an educated guess, our current mayor doesn't strike me as the type.) I can see someone on a city council committee being intrigued by the idea and ordering up a study to see what the legal and logistical feasibility would be, at which point it goes to the interminable Good Idea Graveyard known as Seattle Process. The basic idea of direct democracy having been largely made illegal in this country by politicians who would rather not think of such nightmares, such a scheme also might well have to be modified (i.e., watered down) to pass legal muster.

But if politicians are unwilling to consider and adopt direct democracy in how local taxes are spent, that's not the end of it. (It's summer, it's warm, I can daydream, right?) We do have a citizen initiative process, too.

I'm just sayin'.