Go Ahead! Call City Spending Goofy!
City spending becomes more transparent with searchable Web site
By KRISTIN NEHLS
Updated 1:18 PM CST, Tue, Jul 28, 2009
Spending over $80,000 on toilet paper? That’s just goofy, Chicago city officials.
But what are we telling you for? Thanks to some tech-savvy Internet dudes, we can find out just how goofy city spending really is at citypayments.org whenever we want.
Daniel X. O’Neil and Harper Reed are on a mission to send information to the masses with their creation of citypayments.org, a searchable database of city spending and city contracts for a variety of goods and services.
Want information on paper-shredder fees? Done. How much is spent on a coffee pot? You got it.
And if more than $9,000 sounds like too much to allocate to a Paper Shredder Department, then feel free to comment as you please or flag any expenditure as “goofy.”
While most of this information is readily available at the City of Chicago Web site, never before has it been catalogued in such an easy-to-use search. Now grandma can easily share her opinion on $5 million self-cleaning airport seats.
Call it a new tool of procrastination or citizen input at its best, but with anonymous posting options and overwhelming transparency, citypayments.org is already sparking interest.
After all, these big-city-spending goofballs always want to hear the taxpayers’ opinions of their spending habits, are we right?
First Published: Jul 6, 2009 11:57 AM CST
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