Every year, the City of Houston goes through a capital planning process where they allocate about $8 billion over five years.

I wanted to know where these projects are, and how much we’re spending on them. I became curious about this process after last year’s discussion about equitable distribution.

So I extracted a bunch of data from the Excel sheet on the open data portal and put it on a map.

Things to know:

There are 545 CIPs in the 2016-2020 plan, but only 371 appear on this map.

There are two reasons why: (1) the project is not location-specific (like $350k for “data center consolidation” or $61k for “citizen engagement software”), or (2) I was unable to geocode the location. If you find errors, please let me know and I’ll update.

Circle size represents the total budget of the project. The total budget can include allocations over five years. I calculated the radius of the circle by taking the square root of the total budget and multiplied the result by .005.

If you are concerned about a project, look up your council member, give them a call, and reference the CIP# (included in the popup).

There is a lot more data available if you dig into the spreadsheet.

Background information: