Launched in 1994 by the second Mayor Daley, the Aldermanic Menu program is perhaps the most Chicago of city initiatives. By design, the Department of Transportation (CDOT) abdicates responsibility for planning and prioritizing infrastructure maintenance to the local alder. After working on Menu in an aldermanic office for close to seven years, I want you to know a bit more about how this system is failing Chicagoans.
The Menu system underfunds infrastructure citywide and leads to significant disparities between wards. It also eschews infrastructure management best practices, leading to a highly inefficient system that creates higher costs and worse results for all. A program with such results should likely be scrapped, rather than reformed. But since that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, it’s worth discussing a few reforms to the system that would improve its effectiveness and cost-efficiency.
How does Chicago fund its infrastructure?
The city’s most recent five-year Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), covering 2025 to 2029, outlines $18.1B in investments from a variety of sources, including State and Federal dollars (9% and 18% respectively), city-issued bonds (21%), Tax Increment Financing (7%), and specific Water and Aviation Department revenue and bonds (40% together).
Some of these funds can only be used for specific purposes (e.g. certain grants, airport revenues), while others are more flexible. This is the case especially for the city’s own bond revenues and TIF, which we are broadly free to allocate to infrastructure projects as we choose.
The money is also spent across a wide range of priorities, including the Airports, our Water System, and a wide range of transportation priorities. Aldermanic Menu makes up less than 3% of the total, or $489M over 5 years, and is included in the ‘Neighborhood Infrastructure’ category. It is the primary way the city funds improvements to residential streets, alleys and sidewalks. Significantly, Menu is funded almost entirely through flexible bonds and TIF dollars.1
How does the Menu system work?
Each calendar year, CDOT allocates $1.5M to each of the city’s 50 wards. Alders have full discretion on how to spend these funds, picking from a vast “menu” of infrastructure projects (hence the name). Based on in-person surveys and constituent outreach, they can resurface residential streets and alleys, rebuild sidewalks, curbs, and alley aprons, or replace street and alley lights. They can also build upgrades like speed humps, curb extensions, traffic circles, or painted bike lanes. Finally, more unusual projects can involve collaborating with sister agencies to add water fountains in a park or paint a mural on a school building.
Flaw #1: Menu Produces Inequitable and Unequal Outcomes
In a 2017 audit of the Menu program, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that Menu underfunds the city’s needs for resurfacing residential streets and alleys by tens of millions of dollars, conservatively calculating a citywide funding gap of $122M for 2015. In the decade since then, the city has increased its investment in residential infrastructure somewhat – but it has also seen costs rise (resurfacing a city block through Menu cost 28% more in 2025 than in 2015). Factor in the infrastructure needs that the OIG didn’t calculate (sidewalks, curbs, etc.), and Menu’s funding gap rises well clear of $100M, likely several times that. We simply do not budget enough money to maintain our streets, sidewalks, alleys, and curbs in good condition.
To make matters worse, some wards are more badly underfunded than others. CDOT allocates the same amount of funding to each ward, despite vast disparities in their respective needs. The 2017 audit found that the former 34th Ward of the Far South Side needed to repave roughly six times as many streets as Uptown’s 46th Ward, despite receiving the same amount of money. Notably, the OIG found that not a single ward could meet its needs with its annual Menu allocation.
The OIG’s 2017 findings are well summarized in the graph they created below (keep in mind that they only accounted for asphalt resurfacings to calculate infrastructure need).
The Menu process also produces uneven outcomes between wards by relying on alders to determine infrastructure repairs. It would be reasonable for Chicago residents to expect streets and sidewalks to be maintained in roughly the same way across the city. However, since each alder chooses how they use this money in their ward, there are stark differences in infrastructure maintenance between wards. Thus, depending on which side of Granville Ave you live, sidewalk repairs accounted for either 4% or 24% of your ward’s 2023 Menu funds.2
Flaw #2: Menu’s Lack of Comprehensive Planning is Financially Inefficient
Infrastructure maintenance involves planning ahead. The City conducts comprehensive needs assessments and multi-year planning in its five-year, multibillion-dollar CIP. But unlike Chicago’s bridges and arterial streets, our residential infrastructure is not maintained according to any long-term planning, but only according to Menu’s annual funding allocation.3
In fact, Menu’s reliance on elected officials actively precludes long-term planning. Aldermanic offices experience regular turnover and the uncertainty of reelection stops alders from planning their Menu spend more than a few years in the future. When a new alder is elected, there is no system in place to guarantee that their predecessor shares any useful information with them regarding infrastructure needs. The OIG’s 2017 audit found that this lack of planning can result in higher costs down the line as assets go unmaintained.
The Menu program is also inefficient due to the piecemeal approach created by the “menu” itself. As the name implies, the process replaces one item at a time: an alder pays for a fresh coat of asphalt, or a new curb, or a new bump-out, all separately. The inefficiency of this process was driven home to me when I discussed it with a French colleague in my hometown. Frustrated at the cost of raised crosswalks, I asked him how much they cost in Strasbourg. He was confused by the question and went on to explain that the French wouldn’t just build a raised crosswalk by itself: “We wait until we rebuild the street and just include it in the rebuild.”
In Chicago, we rarely ever rebuild residential streets, and Menu simply isn’t set up to do so. It treats different projects as separate and piecemeal. Costs are based on linear feet of asphalt or concrete, regardless of context or location. Different construction crews – some public, some private – don’t coordinate schedules or share staff or materials. So there is no cost saving – and therefore no incentive – for an alder to pay to rebuild your curb at the same time as they repave your street. There also is no cost saving for larger projects: resurfacing three blocks in a row doesn’t save the alder any money over resurfacing three separate blocks spread out across the ward. Breaking up infrastructure maintenance into separate projects means Chicago loses out on the opportunity to stretch public dollars further.
Flaw #3: Menu Requires CDOT to Offload its Planning Responsibility onto Elected Officials
Because residential infrastructure maintenance in Chicago is so underfunded, difficult decisions need to be made each year. Yet, rather than CDOT developing a comprehensive, data-driven approach to maintenance, we’ve offloaded the process to alders.
Alders’ first priority is to be responsive to their constituents; they receive many requests for repairs and try to fund them as best they can. However, we know that more privileged constituents (property owners, and often wealthier and whiter residents) are more likely to contact their representatives. By prioritizing the requests they receive from residents – acting, by all accounts, as a good alderperson – an alder may not be repairing the infrastructure that needs it the most. They are, in fact, likely perpetuating the inequities separating more and less disenfranchised portions of their ward.
Alders who lean against this trend are taking political risks. In the 47th Ward, for example, we chose to repair long stretches of damaged sidewalks along Ashland Ave, where residents of dense rental buildings are less likely to reach out or to fund sidewalk repairs themselves. Relative to use and infrastructure quality across the rest of the ward, there was an objective need for a safe, functioning sidewalk.
However, because Menu funds are limited, prioritizing these repairs meant that we could not fund other repairs that constituents elsewhere had contacted us about. There was an opportunity cost: in crass political terms, certain engaged voters may have believed that we were not responsive to their needs, while less engaged voters who had not asked for sidewalk repairs nevertheless received them. Good government – and good infrastructure maintenance – can very well be at odds with good politics.
The point here is not to criticize alders. They care about their wards and their constituents – and for exactly that reason they may prioritize responsiveness over data-driven infrastructure maintenance. The point is rather that they should not be put in a position to choose between the two on their own.
Some Modest Improvements
As we have seen, the Menu program is not an adequate tool for maintaining our residential infrastructure. It is underfunded, uneven, and inequitable. It precludes any long-term, comprehensive planning that would yield cost savings, instead leaving elected officials to weigh proper maintenance with political considerations.
The most obvious way to solve these flaws is to do away with the Menu program altogether, and replace it with a system in which CDOT is responsible for identifying all residential infrastructure needs citywide; procuring the adequate funding to address those needs; establishing systematic, data-driven, and values-based criteria to prioritize repairs; and executing those repairs. Don’t take my word for it – this was the OIG’s conclusion nearly a decade ago.4
In the short term, however, the Menu system is unlikely to go anywhere. Moving away from it would require reorganizing CDOT, finding hundreds of millions of extra dollars, and asking alders to willingly vote to relinquish their unilateral control over millions of dollars.
The good news is that we can improve the program, based on some recent changes that CDOT has made to its infrastructure management processes.
Recommendation #1: CDOT should take a more active role in guiding how alders prioritize projects
CDOT should provide alders with stronger guidance to help them allocate Menu funds effectively. This starts with conducting a thorough review of the state of residential infrastructure citywide, as the OIG recommended in 2017. Such an analysis should draw on existing city data, including 311 requests by residents – but must crucially be based on in-person surveys and pictures, which are often lacking. Alders could use the comprehensive data to then vet and prioritize locations for repairs.
To aid in decision-making, CDOT should also educate aldermanic teams on infrastructure management best practices.5 This should include discussing how to stretch the ward’s dollars further and setting targets for breaking down funding allocations between types of projects.
When I worked in the 47th Ward, we set funding targets in our annual Menu budget based on our values and goals. We shifted our allocation to reflect the way that constituents actually traveled the ward. This led us to reserve a baseline share of our spend for non-automotive projects to prioritize pedestrians, as well as targeting schools and senior homes for sidewalk repairs, pedestrian safety, and cycling improvements. This data- and values-driven approach allowed us to record the fewest serious pedestrian injuries in over a decade and reduce cyclist crashes by 71% by 2024 compared to 2021.
Helping alders establish similar data-driven goals and criteria based on departmental values and priorities would enable them to make informed decisions, while increasing the level of consistency in infrastructure management between wards.
Recommendation #2: CDOT should expand the residential infrastructure projects it covers directly through dedicated funding
Some of the most important recent changes to the Menu program took place under the Lightfoot administration, which increased its 2021-25 CIP investment using $1.7B in General Obligation bond proceeds. In addition to a sustained increase to each ward’s Menu allocation to keep up with rising costs (from $1.32M to $1.5M), these flexible bond funds allowed CDOT to launch programs to tackle residential infrastructure repairs outside of the Menu system.
Key among these programs was the new Collector Street Resurfacing program. In CDOT’s classification of streets, collectors occupy a middle tier between small residential streets and main arterials. They primarily have garages facing them and serve mostly to collect vehicle traffic traveling from residential streets to arterials. Because fewer constituents live directly on these streets, alders focused on responding to residents’ requests to “please fix my street” are less likely to prioritize resurfacing collectors, often leaving them in poor shape.
Enter Collector Resurfacing: armed with $8M/year in new bond proceeds,6 CDOT is now able to identify long stretches of poorly maintained collectors around the city and repave them in their entirety. Significantly, these projects often also involve rebuilding curbs and alley aprons along the way – thus taking full advantage of relative cost savings from bundling different infrastructure “Menu items” into one simultaneous project. This is all done without relying on aldermanic decision-making – and alders are pleased to see much longer stretches of a street rebuilt than they could have funded alone.
Collector Resurfacings provide a valuable template for CDOT to complement existing Menu funds. Armed with its own flexible funding, the department plans over several years to identify needs and prioritize projects, while avoiding piecemeal work and instead comprehensively restoring streets to stretch dollars further.
CDOT should replicate this approach for other aspects of residential infrastructure: imagine a comprehensive sidewalk repair program based on the city’s own data collection (as opposed to ad hoc responses to 311 requests) and a set of prioritization criteria (e.g. focusing on parks or high-traffic commercial areas, accounting for CDOT’s Mobility and Economic Hardship Index, etc.). Such a program could be built on relatively limited additional funding, compared to a complete overhaul of the Menu program.
Recommendation #3: CDOT should restructure contracts to guarantee cost savings
CDOT should encourage alders to better manage their funds by restructuring the Menu program into one that prices in bulk savings on larger and more comprehensive projects. An alder should be able to replace the curb and repave a street at the same time for a lower cost than the sum of each project done separately, to account for savings in worker hours and materials – just as the city already does in Collector Resurfacings. Similarly, the cost for an alder to resurface three blocks in a row should be lower than the sum of three separate resurfacings. A project reflecting real-world cost savings – which CDOT should be striving to secure in its contracting – would encourage alders to prioritize larger, more coherent projects that would have the added benefit of reducing the extent of disruption residents experience through construction.
This requires reworking a complex set of contracts, with contractors able to execute on different types of Menu items and materials – or with CDOT crews taking on more of the work themselves, to share cost savings with alders. This reworking won’t be easy, but we shouldn’t keep paying more for fewer infrastructure repairs simply because it’s easier.
Recommendation #4: CDOT should better coordinate with utilities to take advantage of approved work for needed residential repairs
CDOT should harness other construction projects to contribute to residential infrastructure maintenance. Whether it’s the Department of Water Management (DWM), Peoples Gas, or their myriad subcontractors, utility work both public and private already brings a lot of construction equipment to your block – paid for, directly or indirectly, by your tax dollars.
Today, when Peoples Gas rips up one sidewalk square in front of each house on a block, they are only required to restore those exact squares – leaving adjacent ones untouched, no matter how damaged they already were. Even DWM, a city department under the purview of City Council, will only replace the curb on the side of the street it impacted after a months-long sewer main replacement.7
The city should be using these larger utility projects to upgrade our infrastructure as ambitiously as possible: rebuilding a street should come with new curb extensions, raised crosswalks, and other safety improvements. However, until we can catch up with the likes of Madison, Wisconsin and figure that out, let’s at least use the opportunity to fix the sidewalk that already needed fixing, even if it sits 20 feet away from where the utility work happened.
A little-known fact is that CDOT and DWM have a precedent in place for this. When DWM crews prepare to rebuild the curb they tore up during a major project, an alder can transfer Menu funds to DWM for them to also replace a nearby portion of curb that they didn’t touch. Not only that, but the cost to the alder is usually much lower than that charged through the Menu process – a reflection, among other things, of the savings that come from using crews that were already deployed on the site anyway.
CDOT should expand this process to all private utilities and mandate that they coordinate with aldermanic offices ahead of restoration. This way, before Peoples Gas fixes the sidewalk squares it broke, an alder could transfer the necessary funds for them to replace other squares on the block that need it.8
We can do better
The Menu program is a uniquely Chicago monster that puts elected officials in charge of residential infrastructure repairs without the necessary support from CDOT. It produces vastly uneven outcomes between wards and means that all our neighborhoods miss out on basic infrastructure management best practices and cost savings.
The Menu program needs to go and residential infrastructure should be managed directly by the experts we employ at the Department of Transportation. Until that happens, however, CDOT can draw on existing initiatives to expand its support to alders, take the lead on more citywide repairs, and use the power of bulk savings and utility work to deliver cost savings – and safer infrastructure – for Chicagoans.