[smsm42]

These data are probably available buries somewhere in periodic financial reports that many cities publish, but as far as I know, there's no common format, many of these reports are not well readable by tools (best case - nicely formatted PDF with numbers buried somewhere within, worst case - PDF scan of some typed pages with numbers buried within) and as far as I know no site that actually aggregates these data into one database. Given the variety of funds, arrangements, regulations and other things, it would not be very easy to create such a database, probably would require a very large investment. And since it the initiative for local authorities to participate in it is next to zero (worst case, it will expose them for criticism, best case they're OK but not getting any benefit) it would probably very hard to pull off. I'd be glad to be mistaken on this.

[cinquemb]

I think you are spot on. I've been searching, and mostly coming up with PDF's (that do give the overall numbers) with very little break down for cities.

It's a pity that with all the hand waving over Open Gov initiatives that things like this are still buried, while I can easily find out all the different colors of street lamps implemented for the past 10 years for xyz neighborhoods…

[smsm42]

Feds probably could use the power of federal grants (or withdrawal of such) to make much more order in this area, but I guess politicos are busy with more interesting things than getting some data in order.

[cinquemb]

Well it could help with getting a sense of spending budgets and allocating resources to states/cities more appropriately, but I guess we have the Federal Reserve for that.

Well I had an idea to convert the PDF's to text, so now i'm working on structuring it and filtering so maybe i can extract some values using some kind of financial dictionary/ statistics techniques.