In February the council asked the City Manager a plain question: which agencies get city money, how much, and what do they deliver for it. Councillor Norieliz DeJesus’s Order 2616 asked the administration to build a system for measuring outcomes at every agency the city funds. The answer that came back on March 9 was a set of screenshots from the city’s online finance dashboard.
What the council got
The response, 26CM49, says the administration “is in full agreement with this Council order and its goal of increasing transparency,” and points councillors to the Socrata open-finance portal “that allows anyone to dig deep into the City” spending. Attached are printed dashboard pages: bar charts of vendor spending by department, with the bars unlabeled. Only department totals are legible: Housing and Community Development $258,995 in FY25, Public Works $1.60 million, Public Health $481,840, Elder Affairs $112,625. The vendor rankings, once the rotated pages were transcribed, show La Colaborativa, GreenRoots, the Selah Day Resource Center and CAPIC at the top of Health and Human Services spending, CAPIC and North Suffolk Community Services at the top of Public Health, and, under Public Works, an individual contractor and Roca. The bars carry no dollar values. Per-organization amounts cannot be read from anything the council received.
One line does stand out: Health and Human Services operating spending went from $2,976 in FY25 to $151,745 in FY26 year to date, a fifty-fold increase that the response does not explain.
Why it matters
Chelsea routes a growing share of its social services through nonprofits. La Colaborativa runs the food and workforce programs, GreenRoots the environmental and youth work, CAPIC the fuel assistance and outreach, and the city pays them through contracts and grants that show up in the budget as “professional services” or “other services” under whatever department holds the contract. The council’s order was not hostile to that arrangement. It asked for the thing any funder asks for: a list of what was paid and what was measured.
The dashboard exists and it is a real tool. It is also a tool for someone with time to click through 30 departments and export vendor tables, which is not what a council order for a report means. The council accepted the response and filed it. Nobody moved to ask again.
We have filed a public records request for the FY25 and FY26 vendor payment tables by department, which is the spreadsheet behind the charts. We will publish the per-organization figures when we have them.