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CHICAGO FOOD CART STORY
A new ordinance will be passed meant to help Chicago food cart vendors and their businesses thrive in the windy city.
Data Visualization Example
Did Chicago’s Cut in Funding for Street Sanitation Possibly Cause the City’s Increasing Rat Problem?
Eva Mick
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New Chicago budget data suggests a change in funding for rodent baiting and street sanitation in the city. Due to a decrease in funding for sanitation, garbage and trash increased, potentially creating a bigger rat problem in Chicago. The more debris and waste is left out, the more rodents will spread around the city.
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The Bureau of Sanitation is responsible for garbage pickup and recycling removal from family homes, residential buildings and all other public areas. Between 2015 and 2017, the city decreased funding to the Department of Sanitation by 1%. Previously, the city’s budget gave the department 5% of its funding and now it now only gives 4%.
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According to the Chicago’s 2017 budget overview, more funding is set for rodent control than garbage sanitation in the city. The timeline below suggests an increase in rodent baiting and a slight increase in sanitation complaints taken from the Chicago public data portal.
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This data shows the number of rodent complaints from 2015 to the present, as well as the amount of sanitation complaints in the same time frame.
The timeline also suggests that in January 2015, we had about the same amount of complaints for both rodents and sanitation. Over the span of two years, rodent baiting complaints increased at a faster pace than sanitation complaints. Sanitation complaints, however, were rather steady.
In August of this year, rodent complaints spiked to about 7,000 more than we've had in the past ten years.
In 2015, Chicago set aside about 5 million to fund the rodent problem in the city. Rodent control was funded together with the streets and sanitation under the Bureau of Sanitation. However, this past year Rodent Control received their own Bureau due to the increase in rats around the city. The 2017 budget overview shows a funding comparison of zero dollars attributed to the Bureau of rodent control in 2016 and in 2017, the bureau received about ten million in funding.