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…
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.
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.
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…