Frequently Asked Questions

What does "Ignore the boring stuff" mean?

A lot of the city hall documents are routine documents such as permits or extensions of recognition, congratulations, or gratitude. By default, City Hall Monitor will filter these documents from your search. If what you are looking for might be in some of those filtered documents, deselect "Ignore the boring stuff" when you search. Read more »

Filters that are used include the following exact string matches:

  • "Condominium claim"
  • "Congratulations extended"
  • "Gratitude extended"
  • "Recognition extended"
  • "Issuance of permits for sign(s)"
  • "Sidewalk cafe(s) for"
  • "Canopy(s) for"
  • "Awning(s) for"
  • "Residential permit parking"
  • "Handicapped Parking Permit"
  • "Handicapped permit"
  • "Grant(s) of privilege in public way"
  • "Loading/Standing/Tow Zone(s)"
  • "Senior citizens sewer refund(s)"
  • "Oath of office"

Important note about search update subscriptions: When subscribing to search updates, the above filters are not applied when checking for new documents to match your search. Thus, you will be notified of any new documents matching your search, including the "boring" stuff.

How is City Hall Monitor different from Councilmatic?
Councilmatic is an excellent project which tries to "demystify" the Chicago City Council. City Hall Monitor (CHM) isn't meant to compete with it. City Hall Monitor, as a website, has provided a framework around which the Knight Lab team can develop familiarity with the corpus of Chicago City Council documents towards the bigger goal of developing document analysis methods. CHM also provides an opportunity for our community to keep up with current tools and best practices for building data-oriented websites.
Understanding search results
Last updated date and matter status

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2016-01-13

Placed on File

The matter title.

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Notification of sale of City of Chicago Multi-Family Housing Revenue Bonds, Series 2015 (St. Edmond's Oasis Project)
A preview of pages within the document. Some matters have multiple documents.

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130 more pages

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Number of pages.