The City has recently posted all overtime payments made during 2008, 2009, 2010, and thru April 2011. (Notably excluded is overtime payment data for the Chicago Police Department, which is the department where the most overtime payments occur.) The City posted this data in a pdf format, instead of in a format that easily enables analysis of the data. We assume to this to have been an oversight given the City’s investment in its data portal, which is designed for publishing this type of data in an enhanced format for access and analysis, and for which the City should be credited.
To help facilitate analysis of overtime spending, we have converted the pdfs into Excel and CSV files, which are available below. While we are happy to provide this information, the City should publish this (and all such) information itself through its data portal to allow users to analyze and explore these datasets. As always, please let us know how we can make this information more useful and/or user friendly.
- 2008 Overtime Payments (xls, csv)
- 2009 Overtime Payments (xls, csv)
- 2010 Overtime Payments (xls, csv)
- 2011 Overtime Payments thru April (xls, csv)
Note: We used pdf-to-excel conversion software to create these files. Because this software is not perfect there may be a small number of mistakes in the files. The most likely mistake is that some middle initials have been inadvertently cutoff from the name columns. This is another reason for the City to publish the data itself, it is in the best position to provide validated, clean data. Additionally, we made one purposeful edit to the data. We standardized the department names across all the years. In the City’s pdf files, the names sometimes differed from year-to-year. For example, in one year some abbreviations were used, while the next year only the full department names were used. This standardization was done to better enable year-to-year comparisons.