Inside Chicago Government has created a monthly picture calendar for 2025.

It features photos of Chicago city employees on the job, which we gathered from all over town.

We've titled the calendar "The City that Doesn't Work," cribbed from Chicago's unofficial slogan, "The city that works."

We'll send the calendar—printed in Chicago on high-quality, photographic card stock, with its own desktop stand—to folks who subscribe to Inside Chicago Government at the Chief of Staff level.

Our inspiration for the calendar is captured by this quote from former inspector general Joe Ferguson, in a Sept. 5 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times:

"The Water Department operates under 17 different collective bargaining agreements . . . It routinely involves staffing modest-sized street projects with a whole array of people who have to take turns doing their job with everybody else sort of standing around a hole or standing by waiting for their turn. There have got to be ways to do this better."

Learn about Chicago's "The city that works" slogan here (requires Superintendent or higher subscription):