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Overview

D4A Statement on the Budget Vote

Budget Items that We Support

Budget Talk Meetings

Politics Watch: City Budget Edition

House Parties

We are fighting for an equitable and just Durham where everybody feels secure, safe, and cared for. In this fight, budgets have the most immediate impact in shaping people’s lives and determining who can access what. 

But too many Durham residents feel left out of the city budget process, believing that being engaged in this process requires some sort of expertise that they don’t have.

In our rapidly growing city, we have many new housing developments, yet more people are housing insecure. More jobs are coming to the city, yet wages remain low for too many families. Additionally, because high food and gas prices are eating into the pockets of Durhamites, our vision of equity, justice, security, and care seem even less attainable. 

Through the Boost the Budget campaign, we will:

• collectively learn about the city budget process 
• organize towards a sustainable movement that brings about real change through consistent unified action in our local politics
• mobilize Durham to vote for a City Council that’s capable of offering unprecedented solutions in these unprecedented times.

Together, all races of working people can use the power of local government through budgets and elections to bring to Durham good paying jobs with benefits, more affordable housing, more safe places for our kids to play, and so much more.

Will you join us? RSVP to our first Budget Talk meeting to get involved in the decision making for how our hard earned public dollars should be distributed in the city budget.

On Tuesday, June 20th, the City Council voted on the 2023-2024 budget. Durham for All used the Boost the Budget campaign to increase working and middle class people’s, especially working class people of color’s, knowledge of the city budget and its process, uplifting their voices about and participation in the city budget, identifying budget allocations that Durham residents wanted to see more money for, and spread the word on thoughts that D4A and our base have about the budget. We are proud of our efforts to meet these goals. 

Over the course of Boost the Budget, our staff and campaign teams (made up of our organizer and leaders from our membership) engaged Durhamites in a few different ways:

Over 20 community members attended house meetings and discussed the budget with their friends and neighbors. We continued those conversations at Budget Talk meetings with Council Members Johnson and Caballero—together, we learned about and generated solutions for Durham’s city budget.

We support the votes of Council Members Jillian Johnson, Javiera Caballero, Mark-Anthony Middleton, and Leonardo Williams to pass this budget. Although not perfect, we believe that the budget takes significant steps to address both long standing and newer issues in Durham, and addresses a diverse range of our communities’ needs.

Overall there were nine budget allocations that we thought best exemplified Durham for All’s values and were inline with the demands of working and middle class communities in Durham that joined us:

Sanctuary For All

Everyone deserves to feel safe and secure in their homes, bodies, and communities

H.E.A.R.T. program: funding to go city-wide with 27 additional staff positions
A program launched by the City of Durham’s Community Safety Department to send unarmed trained professionals to nonviolent calls.

Bull City United: continued funding
A program aiming to disrupt violence through interventions by  people from the impacted communities before violence takes place.

Vision Zero program: funding for a full-time coordinator position
A program approved by City Council in 2017 to reduce and eventually eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries. 

Immigrant and Refugee Department: funding for a full-time coordinator position
provides services and assistance to the diverse community of people who have immigrated to the US and call Durham home. (City pays 50% of the funds needed for an Immigrant and Refugee Coordinator that is housed with the County, the County pays the other %50)

Immigrant Defense Fund: one-time funding
provides legal defense for Durhamites that have immigrated here.

Homes for All

Everyone has a right to live in a safe and affordable home

In the 2023-24 Budget – $160 million to go towards updating existing housing, building new housing for those in the low to moderate income range, building housing with wrap-around services for the unhoused population, and assisting homeowners with their property taxes.

Economy for All

Everyone has the right to the resources they need to sustain themselves and their families and to live on a healthy planet.

Hayti Reinvestment Initiative: An initiative to reinvest $10 million in Durham’s most historic Black community following decades of it being starved of the resources it needs for the area to thrive.

What we like: Investing in a Black neighborhood that has been disinvested from for far too long.
What we’re monitoring and will stay engaged around: Who gets to benefit and how from the economic opportunities that this influx of funds will create?

Convention Center Feasibility Study:  A study to find ways for Durham to get more tax dollars through a more optimal use of the convention center. This would then increase the amount of money the city would have to spend in the budget annually.

What we like: Investing in a Black neighborhood that has been disinvested from for far too long.
What we’re monitoring and will stay engaged around: Who gets to benefit and how from the economic opportunities that this influx of funds will create?

Democracy for All

Durham belongs to all who live here: Native, refugee and migrant, Black, Brown, Latino/a, Muslim, white, and Jewish, documented and undocumented, and LGBTQ.

Regular Community Meetings/Engagement: An initiative for the city to do regular meetings with the community to talk to and work with electeds to get certain priorities for the community accomplished. Funding will be used to host the meeting and compensate the time of community members that participate in the meetings

While we see positive steps taken by the City Council with the 2023-24 budget, some of the most pressing and contentious issues lie both within and beyond the budget. Two of the biggest areas that illustrate this are affordable housing and public safety.

Affordable Housing:

Having more affordable housing includes the city approving projects from developers for updating and creating more affordable homes; and ensuring that city infrastructure (road upkeep, road expansions, making more walkable neighborhoods with sidewalks and pedestrian bridges, improving public transit, etc.) is keeping up with the influx of people moving to the city. Especially since over the past several years the Durham area is one of the fastest growing places in the country.

Public Safety:

There are three dominant trends, nationally and in Durham, that are keeping the issue of public safety at the fore of Durham politics:

1. the continued momentum and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the multiracial movement to end police involved killings and harassment of unarmed Black and Brown people.
2. the uptick in gun violence for community and mass shootings.
3. the ongoing police officer shortages and the increasing use of police surveillance technology, especially in working class Black and Brown communities.

These officer shortages represent an opportunity to look at alternatives to policing (including surveillance) that reduce the scope, size, and scale of the police force. Great examples of alternatives to policing and alternatives to increased police surveillance are H.E.A.R.T. and Bull City United that both provide ways to disrupt cycles of violence and socioeconomic instability that our most marginalized communities have been systemically subject to for decades.

Budgets are places of competing and converging interests between community, organizations, institutions, and government. Much of the Boost the Budget campaign was focused on what is in the FY 2023-24 city budget. Given that the city council makes the final decision on what the budget will be, who is making that decision is just as, if not more, important than what’s in it. Municipal elections are where we elect council members that can set the political possibilities for how city budgets can facilitate even more equity, care, and justice that benefits all. As D4A closes the chapter on the final 2023-24 city budget, stay tuned for how to keep building our multiracial and multigendered movement in the pivotal upcoming election.

In the meantime, click here to join us for the continuation of this work in the Fall, as we work to choose, endorse, and elect council members who share these visions and have plans to make them the reality of Durham.

The draft of Durham’s 2023-24 budget was presented by City Manager Wanda Page at the May 15th City Council meeting.

Durham for All strongly supports the following budget items which address some of our communities’ most urgent needs:

Affordable Housing

• $160 million in funding for affordable housing

Public Safety

• Increased funding for H.E.A.R.T: city wide – 12 hours
• Allocated funding for a Vision Zero coordinator

Economic Development and Investment

• Convention Center Feasibility Study (increasing revenue without increasing population and thus services the population needs)
• $10 million Hayti Reinvestment Initiative

Immigrant and Refugee Support

• Providing full funding for Immigrant Defense Fund
• Adding positions to the Immigrant and Refugee Department (City funds 50% and other 50% comes from county)

Democratic Participation

• Regular Community Meeting/Engagement Funding: Funds for an initiative for the city to do regular meetings with the community to talk to and work with electeds to get certain priorities for the community done.

We believe that these budget items are crucial in moving us closer to a Durham where people from all backgrounds can call it home and feel safe; where everybody has access to good jobs, housing, and resources that ensure a life with dignity; and where all residents can meaningfully participate in the governing of their city.

The city budget is a crucial way our communities can get the care, justice, and security Durhamites need to thrive regardless of job status, race, gender, or faith.

How much do you know about Durham’s budget process? Do you know which services are prioritized to receive more money (from the city taxes that we pay) and how? Do you know what our City Council members are discussing right now as they work on the next budget?

Too many of us, especially working communities, have been made to think that the budget is too complicated for us to understand or have an opinion about.

The Politics Watch: City Budget Edition is a monthly email we send out with a breakdown of the budget process, summary of what’s being discussed in city council meetings, what community members are saying about those issues, and our analysis on the politics of the budget. As we learn together about what the city budget can pay for, we will collectively apply that knowledge to determine what needs more money and how we can advocate for it. 

Each month, we will be focusing on one issue:

To receive our monthly “Politics Watch: City Budget Edition” emails in your inbox:

Our greatest potential  lies in activating our closest relationships to take decisive and collective steps towards transformation. We grow our ability to change the circumstances in our community by utilizing people power and bringing together these networks of substantive intimate relationships for change making.

The Boost the Budget house parties are opportunities to do exactly that. With support from D4A organizers, Durham community members who joined our organization last year or earlier will plan a house party, invite their friends, neighbors, and loved ones to talk about what we can do together to affect positive change on the current and future city budget. 

If you want to host a house party, contact our community organizer, Cedric Craig (he/him) at cedric[at]durhamforall.org