Increasing Transparency Through a Public Interactive Budget Website

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2022

Prior to 2019, Cook County communicated its annual budget information through a combination of physically printed and electronically accessible budget books. With three volumes comprising the County’s annual appropriation bill (with well over 1,200 pages), communicating budget data through only this means created issues of unequal access. To address this issue, the County set out to create a centralized and interactive website where budget data can be viewed and visualized, including how the budget has changed year-over-year. The end result is a Socrata-based website that provides easy navigation for identifying the annual budget recommended by the President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and the final Annual Appropriation Bill passed by the Board of Commissioners. The website connects to the County’s open data portal where the raw budget data is housed allowing users to download information regarding the County’s revenue, expense and capital budgets, as well as the budgeted salaries for the County’s full-time positions. Since its debut in late 2020, traffic to the interactive budget website and open data portal has grown to almost 70,000 views by 2021. Already, in 2022, the site and underlying data has been viewed over 7,600 times.