244 Illinois Towns, One Dashboard: What We Learned Building MyTownView
Every town in Illinois publishes public data,meeting minutes, budgets, tax rates, pension reports, crime stats. The problem? It's scattered across hundreds of websites, PDFs, and spreadsheets that nobody has time to dig through.
I started MyTownView because I wanted to know what was happening in my own town. What I didn't expect was how deep the rabbit hole goes.
It Started with One Town
Villa Park, DuPage County. I wanted to know what the village board was discussing, whether property taxes were going up, and how the local schools compared to neighboring districts.
Simple questions. But finding the answers meant visiting the village website, the state comptroller's site, the Illinois State Board of Education, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Insurance,and that's before you even get to meeting videos.
So I started pulling data from official sources. Meeting agendas. Property tax rates. Pension fund reports. Then building permits, sales tax revenue, school report cards, environmental data, crime statistics.
One town turned into five. Five turned into thirty.
Today, MyTownView covers 244 municipalities across Cook, DuPage, Will, Kane, and Lake counties.
The Numbers
Here's what 244 towns worth of civic data actually looks like:
| Category | Records | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Board Meetings | 2,400+ (2026 YTD) | CivicClerk, Granicus, YouTube, municipal sites |
| Local News Articles | 3,700+ | Official government sources |
| Crime Statistics | 47,000+ monthly records | I-UCR NIBRS, local police data |
| Pension Fund Records | 10,500+ | IL Dept. of Insurance, IMRF |
| Property Tax Entries | 9,900+ | IL Dept. of Revenue Table 27 |
| School District Records | 4,200+ | ISBE Report Card |
| Environmental Sites | 35,000+ | 8 EPA databases |
| Federal Litigation Cases | 5,600+ | CourtListener / PACER |
| Community Events | 20,000+ | Local calendars, iCal feeds |
| TIF Districts | 680+ | IL Comptroller |
| Sales Tax Revenue Records | 40,000+ | IL Dept. of Revenue |
All from official, public sources. We don't editorialize,we just make it findable.
What Surprised Us
Building this platform across 244 towns, a few things stood out that we didn't expect going in.
Government transparency varies wildly
Some towns record every meeting, post every agenda, and make everything searchable. Others barely have a working website.
One small DuPage County village has 280 meetings in our system. Some towns of similar size have zero publicly available recordings. Same state, same laws,completely different levels of access.
"Public data" isn't really public
Technically, it is. But when a pension report is buried in a PDF on a state agency website that requires three clicks and a specific fiscal year code to find, it might as well not exist.
The data is "public" the way a book is "available" at a library with no catalog, no librarian, and the lights off.
We pull from over 1,600 data sources to bring it all into one place.
The same data lives in different formats everywhere
Meeting platforms differ by town,CivicClerk, Granicus, YouTube, PDF uploads. Property tax data comes from the Department of Revenue in Excel. Pension data requires navigating an ASP.NET postback form from 2004. School data is a 38-megabyte Excel workbook with 899 columns.
There is no standard. Every data source is its own puzzle.
Every town is connected to every other town
Your property tax bill isn't just about your village,it includes the school district, the park district, the library, the fire protection district, the community college. A single address can be in 10+ overlapping taxing districts.
Understanding one town means understanding the web around it. That's why we built comparison and ranking tools,so you can see where your community stands relative to its neighbors.
Five Counties and Growing
MyTownView currently covers municipalities across these Illinois counties:
| County | Towns Covered |
|---|---|
| Cook | 122 |
| Lake | 45 |
| DuPage | 29 |
| Kane | 24 |
| Will | 24 |
We're expanding to more counties,and eventually more states. If your town isn't covered yet, request it. The more people who ask for a town, the faster we prioritize it.
Why Free?
Core civic data on MyTownView is free for everyone. Meetings, finances, permits, crime, schools, demographics, events,all of it. If it's public information, we think it should be publicly accessible without digging through dozens of state and county websites.
We offer paid plans for deeper analytics,trend analysis, town comparisons, scorecards, and grant eligibility tools,but the base data that every resident should have access to will always be free.
Try It
If you're curious what's going on in your community, find your town on the coverage map and take a look. You might be surprised what's hiding in the public record.
And if your town isn't on there yet,let us know. We're building this for you.