Category City in Motion

The city's energy-benchmarking file is a report card on 3,852 big buildings, one row per building per reporting year. In the 2023 vintage: 769 buildings wear the 4-star placard and 564 wear zero; 2,584 filed and 542 did not; the average K-12 school scores 25.3 points below the average office; one building records a perfect 100; and the filers sum to 637 million square feet and 4.59 million tons of reported greenhouse gas. The file's last portal update: February 5, 2025.

The mayor's 2026 budget proposal carries 27,924 annual positions - plus 3.2 million budgeted hours and 794 budgeted months this page never adds to them. Beside the August employee file: police budgeted 13,727, on payroll 12,181. Police Officer is 31 percent of every budgeted position; the top budgeted salary is the Aviation Commissioner's $350,000, above the superintendent and the mayor.

The city records every taxi-medallion transfer it processes: 5,729 closings since 2007. The median recorded sale was $357,000 in 2013 and $6,000 in 2026 - a 98.3 percent collapse, with transfers nearly stopping (21 in 2015) before prices gave way. One medallion fell from $380,000 to $12,000; the file's most frequent seller is the city's own BACP. Prices from positive-price sales; 166 $0 transfers counted apart.

By the city's own 2025 financial report, Chicago's four pension funds held $14.20 billion against $50.63 billion of pension liability at the end of 2025 - 28.1 percent funded, up from 25.4. The funds' own actuaries project none passing 50 percent before 2043 on the statutory schedule, which they call back-loaded; the same day's press release states 28.15 percent on a different liability basis. Every figure from the city's report, the funds' valuations, the state's biennial report and the Council's analysts, page-checked.

The city's three environmental files - 65,402 complaint rows, 282,616 inspection rows, 37,927 enforcement rows - each split at January 1, 2012 between the Department of Environment's system and the Department of Public Health's. The older half of the complaints and inspections files records no outcome on any row; the newer half records one on every row but leaves half its complaints undated; inspection dates run from 1753 to 4202; and the enforcement fine column repeats and goes negative, so no dollar total appears.

Open Air Chicago's 277 non-regulatory sensors, read from the program's daily file: 102,907 sensor-days from July 26, 2025 through August 20, 2026, a median day at 9.02 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter, half of sensor-days Good and most of the rest Moderate by the file's own AQI column - and July 16 and 17, 2026, when the network-wide mean hit 133 and 168 inside a stretch the state EPA and the city flagged for wildfire smoke. Provider-calibrated values, UTC days, no compliance finding.

Chicago reversed its river in 1900 - and MWRD's own posted log shows the district has released waterway water back into Lake Michigan 36 times from 1985 through 2025: 52.5 billion gallons, 41 percent of it in the September 2008 and April 2013 storms, the last in July 2023, none in 2024 or 2025 - with the district's own definition of a 'reversal' and its note that TARP reduced them.