The three stages
Pace of spending
Pace of awarding
Agency velocity
| Agency | Open pipeline | Spent (TTM) | Awarded (TTM) | Backlog, years |
|---|
Methodology & definitions
The three measures
Committed, unspent is the forward pipeline from the Pipeline page: total project budgets minus spending to date across active capital projects in the City's most recent capital plan snapshot (NYC OMB, dataset fb86-vt7u). Awarded is trailing-twelve-month construction award value from the City Record (dataset qyyg-4tf5), as on the Awarded page. Spent is trailing-year capital outlays, measured as the growth in each project's cumulative spend-to-date between capital plan snapshots — the City's own FMS ledger, the same accounting that powers Checkbook NYC.
How spending pace is computed
OMB publishes a plan snapshot roughly every four months. For each project, spending in a period is its cumulative spend-to-date in one snapshot minus the prior snapshot, floored at zero; new projects count from zero. Projects are matched across snapshots by agency and FMS ID, with sub-project rows collapsed first so nothing is double-counted. Projects that leave the dataset between snapshots stop contributing — a conservative treatment.
Backlog coverage
Unspent committed dollars divided by trailing-year spending: how many years the current funded pipeline would take to deliver at today's pace. It's the demand-side counterpart to a contractor's backlog ratio — higher means more future work stacked behind the same delivery capacity.
Scope
Committed and Spent cover the City's full capital plan — buildings, transportation, water, parks — because capital budgets aren't divided by procurement category. Awarded covers the City Record's two construction procurement categories. The three measures answer one question from different ledgers: how demand is moving. They are not a single cohort traced end-to-end, and the methodology keeps each measure on its own source's terms.
Agency velocity
Agencies are matched across the two sources (capital plan codes to City Record names) for the agencies that appear in both. Backlog years is each agency's open pipeline divided by its own trailing-year spending.