Menu money
Where does each ward's $1.5 million a year go?
The question
Every Chicago alder controls about $1.5 million a year for neighborhood infrastructure, roughly $70 million citywide. The records are public, scattered across two decades of PDFs.
Collect
An extractor turns each year’s spending reports into one table: ward, year, item, location, cost and category for 51,073 line items from 2005 to early 2026. The city geocoder places about 95% of them on the map, and every row keeps its source PDF.
Analyze
Item names are grouped into 30 kinds of project, so a ward’s spending on speed humps, alley paving or street lights can be compared with every other ward’s, year by year. For each kind, the release records what wards actually paid, spread and all.
Present
The Menu money pages on Ward Wise let anyone look up a ward, compare two, map the projects, or open the price list, set out like a restaurant menu with the city’s own photo of each item. Every view carries a citation, and the data ships as a versioned public release.