For more information, go to www.nipc.cog.il.us

Website host: the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC)
NIPC was created in 1957 by the Illinois General Assembly and assigned three broad responsibilities:
(1) To conduct research required for planning for the region.
(2) To prepare comprehensive plans and policies to guide the region's development.
(3) To advise and assist local governments

NIPC's governing body includes 34 commissioners who are appointed by the governor of Illinois, the six county boards, a quadrennial assembly of suburban mayors, the mayor of Chicago and special-purpose governments or associations responsible for transportation, wastewater management and parks. NIPC's planning responsibilities incorporate six counties in northeastern Illinois: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will. NIPC has been instrumental in many regional efforts such as the Campaign for Sensible Growth, the Chicago Wilderness's Biodiversity Recovery Plan and the Subarea Residential Planning Project.

NIPC's core business: data and mapping services for the Chicago region
At the core of NIPC's mission is the provision of data, statistical analysis and GIS (geographic information systems) mapping services. NIPC maintains nine full-time staff positions in the GIS/Research department and serves as a regional repository for US census data. Data and GIS maps are regularly published and made available to the public on NIPC's website (www.nipc.cog.il.us). The NIPC Development Database (NDD) was instituted in 1987 to track development and construction activity in the six-county Northeastern Illinois region. Interactive web-based GIS mapping is among NIPC's key strategies for enhancing its technical capacity over the next two years. The current release of 2000 census data is particularly significant for NIPC, a regional repository of US Census Bureau data for the Chicago metropolitan area.

NIPC consistently works to balance the concerns, intentions and competing interests of 272 municipalities plus several hundred other governmental and quasi-governmental bodies (county governments, school districts, transportation authorities and so on). These constituencies include the urban and suburban, affluent and impoverished, established neighborhoods and immigrant communities. Environmental concerns are balanced against economic ones, growth is balanced against preservation, change against continuity. In this context, NIPC has established credibility as an honest broker of competing interests across the six-county region.