Where the capital money goes
Arcadia's Capital Improvement & Equipment Replacement Plan FY2025-2030 programmes $10,500,500 across 12 projects — new buildings, repaved streets, replaced water mains. This is the part of a budget you can see out of a window, so it is shown on a map.
Read the shapes carefully
The city's plan describes where each project is in words — "City Hall", "Baldwin Ave from Camino Real Ave to Longden Ave", "Various Locations". It contains no coordinates at all. Every shape below was placed by One Public Budget by matching that text against public street and place data. The locations are our inference, not the city's data. Each one tells you how it was placed and how confident we are. Where we could not place a project, it is listed below the map rather than dropped or guessed at.
On the flat map, size is the place and shade is the money. Each site is drawn as the shape that is really there — the buildings, the park, the street — so a big shape is a big place, not a big number. How dark it is shaded is the site's combined cost. Where several projects landed at one place they are shown once, with the combined figure; the site's own page lists them separately.
4 projects with a location we could place
Starting the 3D view…
Buildings, by use
- Homes
- Shops, offices, hotels
- Industrial, warehouses
- Schools
- Civic and public buildings
- Use not recorded
Ground, by land use
- Parks and green space
- Sports and recreation
- School grounds
- Commercial areas
- Industrial areas
- Water
Capital projects
- A project, its height its cost
- Several at one site, stacked largest first
The ground itself
- Slopes facing away from the light
- Level ground
- Slopes facing the light
The ground is Arcadia's real elevation, from 68 m at the south end to 1,260 m in the San Gabriel foothills at the north. Vertical scale is true — the hills are not exaggerated. Shading is a hillshade lit from the north‑west by map convention, so it shows which way a slope faces; it does not mean anything about the budget. Ground height is metres; column height is money. The two are different things in the same picture, which is why the columns are the only green and every one of them states its figure on hover.
Land use comes from OpenStreetMap and describes how land is observed to be used, not the city's legal zoning. Residential land is not shaded — it is most of Arcadia, and colouring it would drown everything else. Homes are still shown as buildings.
Buildings are drawn at heights from OpenStreetMap — 19,298 of Arcadia's 19,585 are tagged with a real height; the rest are drawn at one storey and say so when you hover. Each project is a green column, and its height is its cost — drawn as a share of the largest mapped project in the plan, so a column half as tall is a project costing about half as much. Hover any column for the exact figure and its percentage. Heights compare reliably only from a level or overhead angle: in a tilted view a nearer column looks taller than an equal one further away, and a tall one can hide a short one behind it. The figure floating above each column is rounded to two digits — $6M, $4.5M, $13K — as a signpost, not a source; hover for the exact amount. Where several projects share a site — the Library has three, City Hall has three — their columns are stacked, largest at the bottom, so the height of the whole stack is that site's combined cost and the label above it is that total. Each segment is one project: hover it for its own exact figure. The combined total is arithmetic by One Public Budget, which is why the label also says how many projects it covers. The table carries every figure in full, with no perspective at all.
Basemap: US Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2023 (public domain), © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), and elevation from the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP, public domain). Served from this site; no map tiles are fetched from anyone else.
Every site on the map
The same 3 places the map shades, as a table — so the combined figures the map shows exist in readable form and not only as colour. Sorted by combined cost, highest first.
| Site | Combined cost | Projects | Shading band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volante Drive | $2,120,000 | 1 | band 4 of 5 ($2,120,000–$3,850,000) |
| Orange Grove Park | $550,000 | 2 | band 2 of 5 ($380,000–$750,000) |
| Los Angeles County Public Works | $350,000 | 1 | band 1 of 5 (under $380,000) |
| Total across these sites | $3,020,000 | 4 |
Site totals are arithmetic by One Public Budget over the figures the plan printed per project. A project that covers several locations is counted in full at each of them, never divided between them, so this total can exceed the sum of those projects.
Every mapped project
The same 4 projects, as a table. Sorted by amount.
| Project | Amount | Location, as the city wrote it | How we placed it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Water Main Replacement Program | $2,120,000 | Volante Drive between Altura Road and Monte Vista Road | high confidence matched Volante Drive between its two named cross streets in the Census street network |
| Water Master Plan Update | $350,000 | Public Works Services Department | medium confidence matched to Los Angeles County Public Works in OpenStreetMap |
| Orange Grove Well 5 Relining | $350,000 | Orange Grove Plant | medium confidence matched to Orange Grove Park in OpenStreetMap |
| Orange Grove Well Treatment - Design and Construction | $200,000 | Orange Grove Plant | medium confidence matched to Orange Grove Park in OpenStreetMap |
3 projects the city describes as citywide
These are not missing from the map — they genuinely have no single place. Slurry sealing "various street locations", tree replacement "various locations". Putting a pin in the middle of town for these would invent a precision the city never claimed.
| Project | Amount | Location, as the city wrote it |
|---|---|---|
| SCADA System Replacement | $900,000 | All Water Facilities and Sewer Lift Station within the City |
| Arcadia Wash Bridge Guard Railing Improvement Program | $800,000 | Various Locations |
| Valve Replacement Program | $700,000 | Various Locations |
5 projects we could not place
This is our shortfall, not the city's. These projects name a real place — a fire station, a water plant, a stretch of alley — that our matching could not pin down. They are listed here in full so that money is never quietly missing from the picture.
| Project | Amount | Location, as the city wrote it |
|---|---|---|
| Well Inspection and Rehabilitation Program | $1,900,000 | Orange Grove Well 6 |
| Well Inspection and Rehabilitation Program | $1,500,000 | Camino Real Well 3 |
| Purchase and Install 800kw Generator at Live Oak Treatment Plant | $850,000 | Live Oak Water Treatment Facility |
| Canyon Reservoirs Coating | $800,000 | Canyon Plant |
| Public Works Facility Improvements | $30,500 | Public Works Service Center |