#186 City Haul: Investigating Chicago's Payroll

We’re starting 2016 off with a bang!

Since 2011, the City of Chicago has published all current employee names, salaries positions & titles on the data portal. With over half a million views, it’s the most popular dataset the City has ever published. While this data gives the public valuable insight into how Chicago’s tax dollars are spent, it only gives a partial picture when it comes to how much city employees actually earn.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Chicago Sun-Times was able to get the data to tell the full story, and in November 2015, published an investigation looking at all of the additional ways City of Chicago workers are compensated.

Sun-Times reporters Chris Fusco and Tim Novak will walk us through the process of obtaining and analyzing this information (which they have since made publicly available) and some of the more interesting findings within it.