Consequently, all the organizations receiving funds from Model Cities lobbied frantically at policy board meetings. This year the board met three times a week for three months before convening in mid-March to finalize the budget.

The final budgetary meeting began at 8 p.m. It soon became apparent that the policy board was finding it difficult to divide the much smaller pie. Tempers flared a few times, most strongly during the discussion over how much money the board would keep for itself under Citizen Participation.

A younger member suggested that they should use the money in ways that would more directly aid local residents. "You cut CP and I'll cut you," snapped a member who has served on the board since 1968. "If you came to a few more meetings you'd know why we need the money." Finally, by the time the meeting had ended at midnight, the policy board had reached a compromise. Board members congratulated one another as they left.

Now, local organizations who lost their funds have begun to complain that MCA uses too much of its budget for administrative costs. MCA cannot function efficiently and at the same time finance community groups on a $300,000 budget.

The Model Cities policy board does not directly aid local citizens; it merely allocates funds to groups within the city that aid the underprivileged. Clearly, if the residents of Cambridge must decide between maintaining the board or the local aid organizations, they will choose the latter.

But this does not mean that the allocation of funds by citizens for their community does not have great validity. Hopefully, government policy in the next decade will attempt to increase the efficiency of citizen participation programs rather than eliminate them. For, if the experts and professionals of the bureaucracy cannot integrate citizen participation into the political process, we can expect that the government will become less and less responsive to the needs of unorganized citizens.