When participation becomes too expensive

In the German city of Osterburg, randomly selected citizens were not only supposed to develop recommendations on mobility. Selected proposals were then meant to be put to a vote by the entire town. But this second stage of the participation process will now not take place. The reason reaches far beyond the €13,290 that the referendum itself would cost – and leads straight into the financial difficulties facing many German municipalities.

Citizens' Jury and referendum planned

It was supposed to be the most unusual part of an already unusual democratic experiment. Thirty randomly selected residents of Osterburg deliberate on cycle paths, parking spaces and dangerous roads. They make recommendations. And then all eligible voters in the town decide on some of them. Citizens’ Jury and referendum, deliberation and voting – the two were meant to be combined.

Now that will not happen. After months of examination, Osterburg’s municipal administration has concluded that none of the three questions proposed by the mini public should be put to a referendum. The consequences are particularly significant for Krumker Straße. The road was to be refurbished and, at the same time, equipped with a shared cycle and footpath. A referendum was initially planned to coincide with the state election and later scheduled for January 2027. It is now set to be cancelled altogether.

Thirty people, six meetings

The story goes back to 2024. That year, the city council decided that Osterburg would participate in a publicly funded participation project. The following year, 900 residents were randomly selected from the population register and invited to take part. A total of 168 expressed an interest. From this group, 30 people were selected, with age, gender, educational background and place of residence taken into account.

Between August and November 2025, they met six times. Their topic was “mobility and cycling” across the municipality: cycle paths, school routes, parking, traffic management and road development. Independent facilitators and experts accompanied the deliberations. The randomly selected participants ranged in age from 16 to 83 and came from all eleven localities belonging to the municipality. In the end, they agreed on 21 recommendations.

For those organising the process, one of its purposes was precisely to bring people with different views into conversation. “In times of political polarisation, regardless of the issue, it is important to have spaces in which people can discuss political questions respectfully,” said Steffen Krenzer from the “Klima trifft Kommune” model project. One participant put it more simply: “We remain in conversation despite having different opinions, and I am very grateful for that.” Another said: “I was very impressed that we were such a mixed group and still managed to find common ground.”

From sortition to a public vote

Osterburg was not experimenting with random selection for the first time. A previous Citizens’ Jury had already deliberated on climate protection in 2022 and 2023. But the second process went a decisive step further. Osterburg is participating in the “Klima trifft Kommune” (Climate meets municipality) model project, which is supported by Mehr Demokratie. The project is designed to combine deliberation by randomly selected citizens with a subsequent binding referendum.

The town itself had explicitly announced: “What is special this time is that some of the Citizens’ Jury’s recommendations will ultimately be put to a public vote.” The randomly selected citizens were therefore also asked to decide which of their recommendations they considered suitable for such a referendum.

Three proposals remained: coloured markings for loading and unloading zones and cycle lanes on Breite Straße, the conversion of two existing parking spaces there into disabled parking spaces, and the refurbishment of Krumker Straße together with the construction of a shared cycle and footpath. All three questions fall within the municipality’s area of responsibility.

A promise with particular weight

When the 21 recommendations were handed over to the city council in December, Mayor Nico Schulz thanked the participants and those who had organised the process. His argument in favour of mini publics was telling: randomly selected bodies bring together people with different ideas and perspectives – not only those who already regularly speak up in political debates.

Four members of the Citizens’ Jury presented the recommendations themselves to local politicians. The citizens’ report did not merely list proposals; it also documented the reasons behind them and the composition of the Assembly.

That mattered because Osterburg had offered more than the usual form of non-binding consultation. The process had been designed from the outset so that some of the recommendations would move on to a second stage: a binding decision by all eligible voters.

Two questions without a referendum

For the two proposals concerning Breite Straße, the administration now sees no need for a referendum. Their implementation does not require a decision by the city council. They are being examined together with other Citizens’ Jury recommendations concerning a wider reorganisation of parking in the area. The public order office is already holding talks with local retailers and other relevant organisations.

Some of the jury’s proposals are therefore already having an effect without a referendum. Since 1 September, for example, the one-way rule on Breite Straße has also applied to cyclists – another recommendation from the Assembly.

That leaves Krumker Straße. Here, the randomly selected citizens saw a clear need for action. They argued that cycling along the road is currently dangerous, especially with oncoming traffic. They also expected demand and traffic to increase because of the new Norma supermarket and the future motorway connection. The administration does not fundamentally disagree. It too expects the road to become more important as a result of new housing development and the planned connection to the A14 motorway.

Almost €2 million for one road

The problem begins with what a successful referendum would actually trigger. Construction would have to start at the junction of Krumker Straße and Seehäuser Straße. The city estimates the cost of this first phase at around €910,000. The subsequent section, from Drescherhof to Rosenstraße, is expected to cost another €1.065 million. A successful referendum would be binding; by law, the municipality would have to implement it within five years.

Under the timetable drawn up by the administration, €60,000 would first be required in 2028 for planning and procurement. In 2029, €850,000 would be needed for the first construction phase, together with further planning expenditure. In 2030, another €995,000 would be due for the second phase. According to the city, financing the project would mean either cancelling other projects or taking out loans. There is no available room in the special infrastructure fund.

A vote on a cycle and footpath would therefore become a decision committing the municipality to an investment of almost €2 million over several years. And it is at this point that Osterburg’s experiment in citizen participation turns into a story about a much larger problem.

When municipalities have to count every euro

German cities and municipalities are responsible for a large share of the infrastructure that citizens use every day: local roads and bridges, schools and childcare centres, fire stations, sports facilities and much more. In many places, however, their financial resources have not kept pace with these responsibilities. Financially weaker municipalities in particular must choose between competing investments, rely on funding programmes from the federal government and the Länder, or take on additional debt.

That financial pressure also affects democracy at the local level. In its “Norderstedt Appeal,” the German Fachverband Bürgerbeteiligung (Association for Citizen Participation) has warned against treating participation as a dispensable extra when municipal budgets become strained. Its message is simple: “Citizen participation is not a luxury.”

The background is structural. Deliberative citizen participation is not a mandatory municipal responsibility in most German municipalities. When budgets tighten, participation offices can therefore be cut, participatory budgeting suspended, and dialogue processes postponed or cancelled.

Participation as a voluntary task

The Association argues that municipalities need two things: a permanently stronger financial base and a change in the status of high-quality citizen participation, from a voluntary service to a municipal obligation.

Behind that demand lies the experience that participation does cost money, but that doing without it can also be costly. Plans can encounter resistance, procedures can be delayed, conflicts can escalate and trust in political institutions can erode. Citizen participation can bring local knowledge into political decisions and increase acceptance even for difficult measures.

Osterburg makes this tension particularly visible. The Citizens’ Jury itself was possible because it was part of a funded model project. The 30 randomly selected citizens spent six evenings deliberating, examining information and agreeing on recommendations. Yet the process now reaches its financial limit precisely at the point where deliberation was supposed to become a binding decision.

Osterburg as a double test case

This is different from the municipality saying that the Krumker Straße recommendation is misguided or legally inadmissible. The administration explicitly states that all three questions selected for a referendum fall within municipal competence. Nevertheless, after its review and weighing of the options, it considers none of them suitable for a vote.

The result is a peculiar democratic imbalance. Citizens were supposed to decide. Yet one possible decision would be so difficult for the municipality to finance that the question is not to be put to them in the first place.

The case therefore demonstrates two different financial limits to participation. A municipality needs money to organise a mini public and a referendum. But binding participation poses an even more fundamental problem: the municipality also needs enough financial freedom to implement an outcome that citizens may choose.

€13,290 for democracy

Then there are the costs of the referendum itself. The administration has calculated them in unusual detail: €850 for technical electoral organisation using the population register, €400 for election software, €1,527.50 in allowances for election board members, €6,825 for printing and sending voting notifications, as well as ballot papers, postal voting documents, postage and miscellaneous costs. The total is €13,290.

Compared with almost €2 million in construction expenditure, that is a small sum. It would therefore be misleading to say that the referendum is being cancelled simply because the vote itself costs €13,290. The decisive issue is the financial obligation that a “yes” vote would create. Under the city’s budget consolidation plan, another major road construction project cannot currently be financed and would “not be justifiable,” the administration argues.

Remarkably, however, the administration also cites the cost of holding the referendum itself. On an issue it regards as “politically and socially uncontroversial,” those costs are said to be disproportionate. The “important instrument of the referendum,” the submission says, would not be given appropriate weight by being used for this question.

Who decides what a vote is worth?

There is a political judgement contained in that reasoning. The Citizens’ Jury had been specifically tasked with selecting recommendations that it considered suitable for a referendum. The randomly selected citizens did exactly that – and chose Krumker Straße as one of them. The administration has now arrived at a different conclusion following its technical and financial assessment.

That does not automatically mean the process has been broken. Recommendations made by a mini public have to be examined legally, technically and financially. But Osterburg had promised more than the usual non-binding consultation: the Citizens’ Jury and the referendum were explicitly intended to form two parts of the same process.

For the credibility of such a model, this is a delicate situation. The participants began their work with the explicit prospect that some of their proposals would not merely be discussed by elected politicians but submitted to the entire electorate for a binding decision.

Citizen participation is not a luxury

This is where the Norderstedt Appeal acquires particular significance. The Fachverband Bürgerbeteiligung warns against reducing participation precisely when municipal budgets are under pressure. Its argument is that financial hardship must not turn democratic participation into a dispensable extra. In difficult times, it says, more dialogue is needed, not less.

The Osterburg case is even more complicated. Here, the lack of money does not only threaten participation itself. The central problem is that binding participation could result in expenditure that the municipality cannot afford. Even if someone else paid the €13,290 required to organise the referendum, the almost €2 million needed for Krumker Straße would remain.

The case therefore reveals a limit that better funding for mini publics alone cannot remove. Binding local democracy requires municipalities that are financially able to choose between genuine political alternatives. Where only what is already affordable can realistically be decided, citizens’ room for decision-making shrinks as well.

What remains of the Citizens’ Jury

The work of the 30 randomly selected citizens will nevertheless not be without consequences. The 21 recommendations are intended to provide the framework for a cycling and mobility plan and to be incorporated into the municipality’s climate protection strategy. Several proposals are already being examined by the administration and political committees.

Krumker Straße is not supposed to disappear permanently from the political agenda either. The administration states that the discussion and vote in the Citizens’ Jury demonstrated that this important transport route must remain “in the focus of the city council and its committees.” If circumstances change, the issue should return to the agenda.

For the participants, however, this is likely to be less than what the model project initially appeared to promise. They deliberated, weighed competing arguments and selected the questions they wanted to put before their fellow citizens. But the vote will not take place.

The question behind the cycle path

A dispute over a few hundred metres of road thus becomes a fundamental question about local democracy. The Norderstedt Appeal argues that citizen participation must not be treated as a luxury. Osterburg shows that something else is required as well: municipalities need not only enough money to organise participation, but also enough financial room for participation to have something meaningful to decide.

The real problem, then, is not the €13,290 that the referendum itself would cost. It is the almost €2 million that a majority of citizens could commit the town to spending – and a system of municipal finance in which such a sum can become an almost insurmountable hurdle for a small municipality.

In Osterburg, a model designed to connect a Citizens’ Jury with direct democracy thus stops before its decisive second stage. The randomly selected citizens were allowed to determine what the town should vote on. Whether the town will actually be allowed to vote on it is now being determined by financial reality.