Interesting data: Payments to contractors by the City of Chicago
Daniel X. O'Neil
The City of Chicago Contract Payments database:
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchWeb/org/cityofchicago/vcsearch/controller/agencySelection/displayAgencyHome.do
It would be cool if someone wrote a scraper that pulls out all payments by date (choose "Payments" from the "I want to search for" pulldown), cache the data, and offer an API to lookup payments, contractors, subcontractors, payment amounts, and other interesting stuff.
Doing a search for 10/10/2008, for instance, delivers 135 records (no permalink). The results page lists all records, along with a link to the item and a link to the index page for that contractor.
Here is an example payment record:
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchWeb/org/cityofchicago/vcsearch/controller/payments/paymentDetails.do?scope=Contract&contractNumber=14645&cityVendorId=47558190H
Each record contains Vendor Name, Address, and Contract, as well as links to subcontractor information and contract details:
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchWeb/org/cityofchicago/vcsearch/controller/payments/voucherLink.do?vendorName=AAC+DESIGNERS+BUILDERS%2C+INC.&voucherNumber=PV85088587090&paymentDate=10%2F10%2F2008&state=IL&zip=60601&addressLine2=&contractNumber=14645&cityVendorId=47558190H&city=CHICAGO&addressLine1=303+E+WACKER+DR+STE+900
The system uses predictable URLs. Here's one for a particular contract for a particular vendor:
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchWeb/org/cityofchicago/vcsearch/controller/contracts/detailsPub.do?contractNumber=14645&cityVendorId=47558190H
Let me know if you do/ would like to do anything with this stuff...
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Daniel X. O'Neil
Larry Makinson
Daniel,
Thanks for an interesting post. The first thing that comes to mind is matching these contracts with campaign contributions. The City of Chicago doesn’t list their contributions online, but apparently the State Board of Elections does. Here’s the donor lookup page: http://www.elections.il.gov/CampaignDisclosure/ContribListSearches.aspx
I checked under the Committees section of the state databases and did indeed find Mayor Daley’s campaign committee, so it looks like the City of Chicago records are there. (All the state government contributions are also searchable at that site – Illinois has one of the best state disclosure offices in the country.)
The linkage between campaign contributions and government contracts, amazingly, has almost never been done on a local level – or state level either, for that matter. Where it has been done, it’s been like picking low-hanging fruit to find big time connections between campaign donors and government contracts. (That’s also what you see at the federal level. Not everyone who gets a contract gives money. But the biggest contractors almost always do.)
This is a great local story in every corner of the nation, just waiting for someone to get the data and play with it.
And wouldn’t it be cool to have a central website that made it easy for people to explore all this on their own. A site like that could even pressure cities and other governments to post more stuff online, by raising people’s expectations of what they should be able to find online. You could have a lot of serious fun with something like this…
Larry Makinson
Aaron Swartz
someone appropriate?) I'd be happy to do the programming if someone is
willing to publish the results.
Derek Willis
Daniel X. O'Neil
Aaron: I can look further into the idea of a local publishing organization, for sure.
Larry: You're right -- there's been a lot of great work on the federal level on campaigns and contributions, and it would be great to bring that energy to the local level. Based on the stability and richness of this data, it might be a good place to start...
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Daniel X. O'Neil