Philly Council's 'Menu Money': $27M a Year, and Ten Council Members Control Most of It

Philadelphia City Council doesn't pass a budget. Council amends the Mayor's budget, then adopts it. But while the Mayor's office writes the document, Council controls a parallel pot of money that doesn't show up under any department: $26.75 million in discretionary pools for fiscal year 2025, about 0.2% of the city's $11.8 billion budget.

Four named pools, five budget lines, and 17 people deciding where the money goes. In 2019, the Philadelphia Inquirer put the total Council could hand out at roughly $80 million a year in “Want a piece of Council's $80M in grant money?” That number is seven years old, nobody has published a replacement, and the article itself is paywalled. What follows is what the city's own budget documents actually say — and where they run out.

The total is small relative to the City of Philadelphia's FY2025 budget of $6.37 billion operating and $5.46 billion capital. But the money lands in specific neighborhoods, on specific nonprofit ledgers, and on specific capital projects. The decision of who gets it is made outside the procurement process the rest of the city's budget goes through. And it is decided by 17 people: 10 district councilmembers and 7 at-large councilmembers.

What counts as “menu money”

The term “menu money” is borrowed from Chicago, where each of the 50 aldermen gets an annual discretionary capital allowance colloquially called “menu money.” Philadelphia has never used the term officially, but the parallel is real and reporters here have started using it. The City of Philadelphia's published budget documents break the discretionary landscape into pieces, and only some of those pieces can be traced to a member.

From the documents I could read, four named pools exist:

• Improvements to Existing Facilities (ITEF) capital — $20 million a year, the largest pool by a wide margin, and the only one that arrives on two separate budget lines. The FY2025–2030 Capital Program puts $800 thousand per council district in Finance and $1.2 million per district in Parks and Recreation, for $2 million a district. Ten districts, $20 million. Both lines are district-only, and neither extends to the at-large members.
• Council member operating discretionary grants — $250,000 per councilmember a year, per the PICA budget process review. Seventeen members × $250K = $4.25 million a year. This is the one pool I could not confirm against the adopted budget: the Council department's FY2025 Purchase of Services line is $3,521,885, less than $250,000 × 17. Treat $4.25 million as a ceiling.
• Philadelphia Activities Fund (PAF) grants — a Council-appointed Board awards nonprofit grants that the ten district council offices recommend, per the city's own description of the program. The city's FY2025 appropriation is $1.5 million — down from $3.35 million in FY2023, and up again to $3.5 million in the FY2026 adopted budget. The only documented guardrail is the PAF 2026 Grant Guidelines, which cap any single organization at $9,500 across all districts.
• Participatory Budgeting — $1 million, citywide. The city's program page is unambiguous: residents “vote directly on how to spend $1 million dollars on capital projects.” The Budget Office runs it with the City Planning Commission; it launched in December 2020, when Jim Kenney was mayor. This is the one pool no councilmember controls, and the only one whose winners are decided by the public.

That is $26.75 million a year in pools I can document, and it is the whole of the documented discretionary layer — not a floor on it. Council members also request capital projects during budget hearings, and those land as line items in departmental capital budgets without any councilmember attached to them. The city publishes no per-member breakdown, so how much of that money belongs to whom is unknowable from the documents.

What at-large members control vs. district members

Here is the finding that reverses the story I expected to write. The published allocations all run toward the districts, not toward the at-large members. A district member's documented FY2025 money is $2 million of ITEF capital, $250,000 in operating grants and about $150,000 of Philadelphia Activities Fund recommendations — call it $2.4 million. An at-large member's documented money is the $250,000 operating grant and nothing else, because ITEF is district-only, the Activities Fund runs on district recommendations, and participatory budgeting is a citywide vote. That is roughly a 9.6-to-1 gap running toward district members.

In 2019, the Inquirer described the opposite arrangement: about $2 million a piece for district members and about $5 million each for at-large members, who were said to control large capital allocations. That was the “menu money” people meant when they said the word. On the documented record, it is gone — or it has migrated into the unattributed councilmanic capital line items, where it cannot be seen. The chart below keeps the two sets of numbers apart: FY2025 first, the 2019 estimate after it, never added together.

How the money flows

None of these pools is allocated through the city's procurement process. The decision of who gets the money is made before procurement rules apply. Each has its own pathway:

Participatory Budgeting. The Budget Office, in partnership with the City Planning Commission, runs the program. Residents submit project ideas; volunteer budget delegates turn them into feasible proposals; residents vote on the final ballot. The City funds and implements the winners, which then flow through standard capital budget execution. Eligible projects must cost $15,000 or more and have a useful life of over five years. It is the most transparency-forward of the pools, and the only one where the voters are not the councilmembers.

ITEF. Capital improvements to existing city facilities — rec centers, libraries, parks, fire stations. Councilmembers negotiate which facilities in their district get funded during budget hearings, and the Capital Program publishes the resulting per-district figures.

Operating grants. Discretionary money from each councilmember's office to nonprofits, civic associations, and other operating expenditures. This is the closest thing to a clean member item in the Philadelphia budget, and it is the only documented pool that reaches the at-large members.

PAF grants. The Philadelphia Activities Fund is a separate nonprofit entity with a Board of Directors that includes Council members. Awards are made at the Board's discretion, considering the recommendation of the district councilmember.

Councilmanic capital. This is the opaque category. During budget hearings each spring, councilmembers request specific capital improvements — a new stretch of trail, a rec center addition, a streetscape project — that get added to departmental capital budgets as line items. The full list is in the adopted Capital Budget document, but the councilmember-by-councilmember attribution isn't aggregated anywhere I could find. If the at-large members still control large capital allocations, that is where they would be, and it is where the 9.6-to-1 gap would close.

What's missing from the public record

I want to be specific about what I couldn't get from the published documents, because the gap is where the story actually lives.

Per-member capital allocations are not published. The Capital Program gives the ITEF money per district, which is per member by construction, but nothing attributes councilmanic capital transfers to the member who requested them. An RTK request to the Office of the Director of Finance, asking for per-member capital allocations for the last three fiscal years, would close this gap.

These are fiscal year 2025 numbers, and FY2026 per-district amounts are not out yet. The Capital Program publishes the ITEF per-district figure for FY25 only; the six-year totals it publishes are program-wide, and I could not find a per-district FY26 number anywhere in the document. So every figure here describes FY25. The Philadelphia Activities Fund, which is a separate operating appropriation, was adopted at $3.5 million for FY2026, up from $1.5 million.

The operating grant figure does not square with the adopted budget. The $250,000-per-member figure comes from a PICA budget process review I could not open, and the Council department's own FY2025 operating line is smaller than $250,000 × 17. Either the grants sit in departmental budgets rather than the Council's, or the figure is wrong. Until somebody opens the review, $4.25 million is a ceiling, and $27 million is a ceiling with it.

The Activities Fund split is an assumption. The $1.5 million FY2025 appropriation is documented. The $150,000 per district member I use is an even split across ten districts, which the city does not publish and which almost certainly is not even.

Participatory budgeting is citywide, so nobody can say where it lands. A resident ballot decides the projects, but the districts that host them are not recorded anywhere I could find.

The 2019 figures are history. The $80 million ceiling and the $2 million / $5 million per-member split trace to a 2019 Inquirer article that is paywalled and could not be opened. They are the last public estimate of the whole layer, and they are six years and several budget cycles out of date. Council composition has changed completely since; Nina Ahmad, Rue Landau and Nicolas O'Rourke took at-large seats in 2024, and Jeffery Young Jr. succeeded Darrell Clarke in the 5th district.

What this surfaces is the structural pace of the cash flow itself. The discretionary layer is small relative to the city's $11.8 billion FY2025 budget — about 0.2%, and less if you count the $6.09 billion of capital spending the Capital Program counts once enterprise, federal, state and private money is included. But the money is allocated outside procurement, and it lands in specific neighborhoods. The Pew Charitable Trusts' September 2024 Capital Budgeting in Philadelphia report covered the related equity question (who gets the city's capital dollars overall) and found spending concentrated in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. The discretionary layer is smaller but operates with the same neighborhood-by-neighborhood decision pattern — and with less transparency.

For the reader, the practical stake is small — under 1% of the city's budget, by definition — but the political stake is large: 17 people decide which nonprofits get funded, which libraries get repaired, and which capital lines make it into the budget. The last public estimate of the total put it at roughly $80 million a year. The honest answer is that nobody outside Council knows the exact number, which is itself the point.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

The pool decomposition (ITEF capital, operating grants, Philadelphia Activities Fund, participatory budgeting) comes from the city's own FY2025 documents, linked inline above. The ITEF figures are from the FY2025–2030 Capital Program and Budget (p.53 for the Finance and Parks ITEF lines, p.9 for the combined ITEF total, p.134 for the Parks section). The Activities Fund appropriation is in the City's FY2025 operating budget detail (Parks and Recreation, class 505). The operating grant figure comes from a PICA budget process review I could not open; PICA's current publications index is linked above. The FY2025 operating and capital budget totals are from the Council's FY2025 budget approval release and the council roster from phlcouncil.com. The $80 million ceiling and the per-member split are from 2019 Inquirer reporting and are cited as history. Canonical dataset: analysis/data/processed/council_discretionary_funds.json.

Methodology details. The per-member bar chart uses only documented FY2025 amounts: ITEF capital at $2 million per district member ($800,000 Finance plus $1.2 million Parks and Recreation), the $250,000 operating grant for every member, and a $150,000 even-split share of the $1.5 million Activities Fund appropriation for the ten district members. Participatory budgeting is citywide and appears as zero for every member, because no councilmember controls it. The composition chart puts those FY2025 figures next to the 2019 Inquirer estimates as a clearly labeled historical proxy; the two sets are never added together.

Limitations. The $250,000-per-member operating grant is a secondary citation that could not be checked against the adopted budget and is carried as an upper bound. The per-district split of the Activities Fund appropriation is an assumption. No per-member capital allocation is published for councilmanic transfers; an RTK request would close that gap. The 2019 Inquirer figures are paywalled, could not be opened, and are used only as attributed history. The Pew report covers citywide capital and does not break out the discretionary layer.