Menu Money

Introduction

Every year, each representative of the Chicago City Council receives $1.5 million to spend on one or more projects in their ward, and these funds are referred to as "menu money." Jake J. Smith set up a dataset with all of these projects from 2012 to 2023. We decided to combine data with 311 calls to learn: are these projects being used to address constituents' concerns about their community?

After perusing data from Chicago's 311 Data Portal and web-scraped alderpeople data from Wikipedia we're still not certain. Given that the streets category is a major concern that constituents believe their representatives can solve (evidenced by all the calls), it seems plausible that alderpeople are responding to those concerns with the elevated quantities of funding towards streets projects. They might not be hearing those concerns by keeping an eye on the data portal like us, but it seems likely that concerns over 311 correlate with concerns they hear via constituent emails and visits.

What remains a mystery is why the elevated numbers of calls about beautification, in large part requests for graffiti removal, aren't also being addressed proportionally with menu money. While we do see many menu money projects devoted to murals and neighborhood clean ups, they aren't funded to nearly the same degree as street and transportation projects. Perhaps further qualitative research can be done to better understand how alder people make their decisions around funding.

Key Vocabulary

Ward: One of 50 geographic boundaries inside the city of Chicago.

Alderperson: A member on the city council representing a ward

Menu Money: Each ward is awarded $1.5 million annually to spend on one or more projects to benefit the community.

311 Call: Cities across the country have a 311 line set up so citizens can tell their city about non-emergent problems. This can include grafitti, noise complaints, etc.

Category: Menu money projects are predefined. Team Gitmoney mapped these categories to 311 calls. For example:

• Beautification: Calls about this could be about graffiti removal, cleaning a vacant lot, weed removal
• Bike Infrastructure: Concerns about vehicles in bike lanes or trash in bike lanes would fall into this category
• Lighting: A call about a light out in an alley or a viaduct would be considered a lighting concern
• Parks & Recreation: A call for a clean and green program request fell into this category
• Plants, Gardens, & Sustainability: tree removal or tree planting requests fell into this category
• Schools and Libraries: No 311 calls were in this category
• Security Cameras: Cameras have been installed to prevent fly dumping — which when trash is disposed of on property without a permit. So, we looked at 311 calls about this for this category.
• Streets and Transportation: There are 13 different 311 categories related to streets and transportation. Calls include complaints about street light outages, potholes, requests for street cleaning, and sign repair requests.