No Request Required: Ranking Illinois' 102 Counties on What They Publish Without Being Asked
Photo: Myotus, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Freedom of Information Act is a right, but it is also a chore. Filing a request takes time, waiting takes patience, and appeals take persistence. The counties that serve their residents best are the ones that make the paperwork unnecessary — publishing budgets, board minutes, and vendor contracts before anyone asks. Toward that end, we scored all 102 Illinois counties on a simple question: how much can a citizen find in fifteen minutes, from a phone, without sending an email?
How We Graded
Each county earned points in four areas, worth 25 points apiece. Budgets: is the current-year budget posted, and is it a searchable document rather than a scanned image? Minutes: are board meeting minutes current within sixty days? Contracts and expenditures: does the county publish check registers, vendor lists, or contract awards? Navigation: can a first-time visitor find any of this within three clicks of the homepage?
We graded what is publicly visible as of this writing, and we acknowledge the limits of such an exercise. Counties may maintain records offline that they publish promptly on request. But that is precisely the point: proactive disclosure is a choice, and the choices vary dramatically.
The High End
A dozen or so counties — concentrated in the collar counties around Chicago and in a few unexpected downstate offices — posted budgets as searchable PDFs, minutes within weeks of each meeting, and, in the strongest cases, line-item check registers. DuPage and McLean counties stand out for expenditure portals that let visitors search payments by vendor. Champaign County's budget documents include narrative summaries a non-specialist can actually read.
What separates the leaders is not wealth but habit. Several small rural counties score well because a single clerk treats the website as a filing cabinet that belongs to the public. That is the standard every county could meet.
The Low End
At the other end of the scorecard sit roughly twenty counties whose sites offer little more than meeting notices and office phone numbers. In a handful of cases, we could not locate a current budget document of any kind online. Several counties post minutes that are more than a year old. One county's "transparency" page linked to a broken URL — a small thing, perhaps, but a telling one.
We will not pretend the low scorers are hiding something. More often, the cause is thin staffing, aging websites, and the absence of anyone insisting otherwise. But the effect is the same for the citizen: to understand how a county spends money, you must file a formal request, wait five business days, and hope the response arrives complete.
Why This Should Be the Default
Illinois law already requires counties to designate a FOIA officer and respond to requests. It requires almost nothing about proactive posting. That inversion gets the incentives backward. When disclosure is reactive, every citizen inquiry costs the county staff time; when it is proactive, one upload serves every resident at once.
Our full scorecard, county by county, is available on this site with the methodology and screenshots. We invite county clerks and board chairs to review their grades and tell us what we missed — and we will update scores as records appear. Sunlight, after all, should not require a stamped envelope.
