Introduction
How the City Pays for Public Works
Steps for Organizing
Organizing Tips
Neighborhood Plannning and NCBG
The NCBG Neighborhood Atlas

Improvements to public infrastructure can serve as a foundation for revitalizing Chicago's neighborhoods, creating economic opportunity for small businesses, producing jobs, and improving the quality of life in residential neighborhoods. Improving infrastructure means repairing and modernizing older school buildings and building new ones to meet growing enrollments. It means building and maintaining a world-class transit system that serves all neighborhoods equally. It means improving our public spaces - streets, sidewalks, libraries, parks - and making sure those basic systems such as water and sewer operate properly. Infrastructure also includes encouraging the type of private investment that genuinely benefits existing residents and businesses and fits into the community's own vision for itself.

Basic Infrastructure

Look around most any Chicago neighborhood and you will find many unmet public works needs. In January 1999, NCBG release Chicago's Public Works Program: Is It Working For Everybody, a ward-by-ward look at the City's investment in basic infrastructure. The study found that on average, each ward needs approximately $4.8 million per year just to maintain its basic infrastructure. Only five wards in Chicago - mainly in and around downtown - were getting enough money to reach that most basic level.

City of Chicago Capital Improvement Plan

The Capital Improvement Program (CIP) is the official statement of the City of Chicago's public works plan for a given five-year period (such as 1998-2002). It is a "wish list" of where the City would like to spend its capital improvement dollars over the coming five years. The CIP also discloses which funding sources the City plans to use to pay for the public improvements, as well as forecasts of construction start and completion dates. The CIP is only a guide -- the City may choose to drop a project or delay it significantly without giving any warning.

But what is a "capital improvement"?

Capital improvements refer to major investments in infrastructure such as roads, sewers, police stations, and water mains -- major expenditures expected to last many years rather than the day-to-day expenses of City government such as trash pickup or street cleaning. The CIP includes projects in seven categories, six of which affect neighborhoods and "redevelopment areas":

Economic Development: This category includes industrial street and viaduct projects, as well as "streetscaping" projects in neighborhood commercial areas.

Municipal Facilities: Libraries, health clinics, senior centers, human services centers, fire and police stations, city-owned office buildings, and municipal operating facilities (including city-owned office buildings and Streets and Sanitation facilities).

 Neighborhood Infrastructure: Alley construction, lighting, new street construction, residential street resurfacing, sidewalk construction, and "other neighborhood improvements" (mainly cul-de-sacs, speed bumps, and other "traffic calming" measures).

Sewers: Sewer construction and rehabilitation.

Transportation: Bridges, intersection safety improvements, major streets, traffic signals, and public transit.

Water: Water mains, pumping stations, the Jardine Water Purification Plant, and the South Water Filtration Plant.

Aviation:  The improvements the City plans to make at the 3rd airport.  But since these capital expenditures are self-financing and don't take resources away from neighborhood capital needs, NCBG does not track them