Letting citizens make real decisions on where millions of public dollars are spent – an innovative strategy favored by some of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s critics – is actually being tried in New York.

This  Sunday New York Times piece describes in detail how “participatory budgeting” is playing out there this spring, as citizens in four city council districts are given responsibility for spending $1 million in each.

(Members of Occupy Baltimore and others who participated in the Mayor’s  February budget-balancing exercise asked for more meaningful involvement in the process and suggested participatory budgeting, which has been tried in Chicago and, now New York.)

Among the projects participants suggested: putting stall-doors on a public school bathroom, improving street lighting and expanding youth programs. Many argued passionately for community gardens and more green space:

One woman, according to the article, described how children in her neighborhood “practiced Mexican folk dancing for hours every week on the sidewalk” and how “on low-traffic Sabbath days, Ecuadoreans play soccer in the middle of a street near a synagogue.”

Some said they feel empowered by the process. But there were also complaints that under the rules of the process, participants were still forced to deal with balky or bureaucratic agencies which had to sign off on projects before they could move forward.

As one woman told the Times “our conversations started to get to the point of ‘What are we doing this for? Just potholes?’”