Community Corner

City Earns High Transparency Rating

The city was ranked one of the most transparent cities in the Illinois Policy Institute's "Local Transparency Project."

The Illinois Policy Institute gave the city of Evanston a 91.7 out of 100 ranking in a "transparency audit" based on the availability of public information.

The city earned the high ranking "for making information about taxes, Freedom of Information Act requests, contracts and other community matters readily available on the city’s website. Meanwhile, Evanston Township earned a record low score of 3.125 for making available almost no information about how it spends $1.3 million in taxpayer dollars," according to a release about the audit.

“The city of Evanston has recorded the second highest transparency score ever,” said Brian Costin, director of outreach at the Institute. “But in Evanston Township … that is the absolute worst we’ve ever graded out of the nearly 100 local government entities we’ve graded in Illinois so far.”

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The overall local scores are as follows:

City of Evanston:  91.7
Evanston-Skokie District 65: 87
Oakton Community College: 82
Evanston Township High School District 202: 77.8
Evanston Township: 3.1

Find out what's happening in Evanstonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The project intends to assist public officials in identifying information that should be made available to citizens. More information on the report is available here.


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