One of the staples of municipal data is the Payroll Database. Long before the Emanuel administration released salary, position, and title information for every worker on the City’s data portal, organizations like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association had done the work of requesting and publishing salary information.
These databases are usually pretty popular content for these organizations. Everyone likes to be in the know, and personal finance is still one of the great taboos of a market culture, full of rank and worth and emotion. I’ve never been a government employee, but I can imagine it odd to have something so personal available to everyone.
In association with raw data, news stories pop up now and again pulling out details from and adding context to this information. We got one yesterday morning from Sun-Times salary maven Fran Spielman: “Hundreds of city workers earned over $10,000 in OT in four months“. It’s good reporting— she did the work of combing through the year-to-date overtime report published by the City and pulling out items of interest. This is important context to the dollars we spend.
There are a few of things wrong with this current state of affairs that could be fixed by some enterprising developer who wanted to build a product using municipal data.
First off, there are disparate sources and work products. Currently, we’ve got salary database over here, the overtime PDFs over here, and a bunch of news stories, budget analyses, and loosely connected content about workers all over the place. Part of this could be solved by a more unified data approach by the City (they could pop OT info into the salary data), but if you’re a developer, this difficulty is a business opportunity. The City certainly has a world of data deeds they need to do; if you can take care of this minute wrinkle, that might be a good thing for everyone.
Once you’ve got a repository that includes the employee name, position, salary, and overtime, you’ve basically got a set of profile information for each City worker. Once you’ve got that, you can get to work on building an engine for associating other content with those records. Fran mentioned some raw numbers, but no names. I assume that’s an editorial decision (none of these people are accused of wrongdoing, after all). I’d like to see every story covering the act of a City worker– snow removal, cops on the beat, attorneys in court— everyone— be somehow associated with their salary profile.
This way, every City employee could show how they earned the money they made. It’s one thing for us to tsk-tsk at the overtime for a hoisting engineer, but it’s another thing altogether if that worker explains how the department they work for has been unable to hire another worker to replace one who left.
I could also imagine an open system where people could tag people to a story. Have you ever read a news story and said, “I know that guy! My friend is the EMT in that picture!”. How about a civic engineer adding a technical case study about tricky vehicle load optimization to her profile? A research assistant for an Alderman adding a post about how hard it was to get a piece of legislation passed? A Commissioner who is proud of an obscure contract he just negotiated and saved us a million dollars? All of this information floats around in an unstructured jumble, just waiting to be recognized for what it is— a piece of someone’s work/ life puzzle.
Here’s another example. It’s remarkable to see how much of our budget is spent on fire and police:
…and it’s another thing altogether to know that a particular police officer with a particular salary won the Lambert Tree Award for saving someone’s life. Perhaps some people are worth every penny. This system would give them a structure for making that case.
It can go the other way, of course. I’m guessing that there are a vast number of documents in Cook County Divorce Court telling tales of workers not working while whiling away wistful afternoons with paramours, Illinois Tollway transponder payments that have people where they shouldn’t be, and credit card payments that reveal fraud. Let’s have it.
But accountability cuts both ways. It’s time we get more sophisticated with raw data, and a City Worker Worth Module is just one way we can start pulling these threads together into cohesive narratives we can own.