Using data from chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov

Published on Jul 28, 2023

We are now using data from chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov to power Chicago Councilmatic.

We have, however, noticed several issues with how the data in the new system is structured. We have informed the Chicago City Clerk about these issues.

The biggest issue is that in the action history of legislation, the actors are often missing and wrong for newer matters, at least based on how it was done under the Legistar system.

For example, O2023-1020, https://chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov/Matter/?matterId=6FBDB317-5C09-EE11-8F6D-001DD809B965

The actor is missing for the "introduce" and "failed to pass" actions.
The actor is wrong for the "refer" action. The actor should be City Council, not the Committee on Transportation and Public Way.
The actor is wrong for the "recommend do not pass" action, it should be the Committee on Transportation and Public Way, not City Council.

This is pretty common with the recent legislation:

There are other challenges with the data. We are documenting the issues we run into in this public GitHub issue.

The Chicago City Clerk eLMS API