The premise is deceptively simple: If you were given $1 million of taxpayer money to build a project for the city, what would it be?

With Participatory Budgeting, an initiative that’s become cornerstone to many New York City Council legislators, including Norwood Councilman Andrew Cohen, that wish could indeed come true. The initiative is once again under way, and council members want your help.

But in the three years since it’s been instituted in the Norwood side of Cohen’s district, what’s really been lacking in PB is participants. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t exactly make them drink. It seems time is a valuable resource that’s too precious for working class Norwood. And the city oftentimes doesn’t see it. After all, how can families scraping by really put a civic dent on civic matters? In the last couple of sessions, a literal handful of people in Norwood (there were 10 people at one session) saw to that. The turnout seems to reflect the neighborhood’s low voter turnout (figures by the New York City Board of Elections show Norwood’s 2015 voter participation at 6 percent). It’s a shame. PB, after all, is attempting to be as inclusive and direct as possible, even including those barred from electoral voting, who often feel marginalized.

On the flipside, when one begins to peel the layers of its process, participating can be time consuming.

Sure, on its surface, PB just involves the public’s input on ideas. But the premise doesn’t end there: the city is asking you to put your urban planning hat on to devise a capital project, which involves a project that builds upon or improves the city’s infrastructure. Any capital project needs to be thoroughly vetted, and it could take months to see a project assessed by city agencies and ultimately voted on by the public.

Once a capital project is picked, however, it will take another five years to see the capital funds. This means that the project you want to see happen after spending months on it will not really happen until five years from now, or more. Delays, depending on the city agency, can languish, meaning that project you spent time conceiving in 2016, may not actually start until 2022. By then, your interest has drifted elsewhere. PB, it seems, only sheds light in the bureaucracy that is New York City government. Admittedly, the projects, including bus countdown clocks, are pretty decent additions.

Perhaps it’s best to alert the fickle that PB takes times and should be prepared to take it on for the long haul. Perhaps it’s better that the citizenry actually be asked for help in deciding where the other type of discretionary funding, the ones that can be doled out during the existing fiscal year, should be earmarked. Isn’t this one of the reasons why citizens grow so fed up with government? They have no say over where their taxpayer money goes. It could just come down to voting where certain discretionary funds can go. Now there’s an efficient way of getting the public involved.