Hello,

Welcome to our Cook County Good Ideas website, where your good ideas can help us serve you better.  Our goal for this site is to become an innovative way to develop, aggregate, share knowledge and information, and submit new ideas in a user-generated system to solve complex problems.

Here's how it works:

1) Post your ideas to help us reach our goals.

2) Help us prioritize by voting and commenting on great ideas.

3) We will review all of the ideas posted to this site. Check the status of an idea (located in the bottom right-hand corner of an idea) and watch it change as staff review, discuss and plan to implement ideas.

4) If you like, Follow an idea and receive updates on it. Share ideas with friends, participate in project discussions and take surveys – be a part of your community in innovative ways online.

It all starts by creating a login and password for participation.  Then, in the sidebar at right, click to find out more about our challenges, and give us your good ideas on how to do a better job in our 5 Project areas: Finance & Administration, Public Safety, Economic Development, Healthcare, and Property & Taxation.

As the County continues throught the 2013 Budget process, Cook County Commissioners ask questions of departments and agencies for additional information and clarification.  Under Discussions, click on "Commissioners 2013 Budget Questions" in the right sidebar to find out what they're asking, and read the exact answer provided to them.

In our Forums, you can tell us your ideas and reccomendations for achieveing specific service goals.

This site is another example of my committment to making Cook County Government more accountable and transparent.  Here are some other sources of county information:

To learn more about the debt profiles of Cook County municipalities, click here for the Cook County Property Portal. 

To monitor how Cook County Government is achieving their performance management goals, click here for STAR, our performance management website.

For over 300 datasets on Cook County, click here for our Open Data Portal.

Thank you for demonstrating your interest in helping make Cook County Government better,

Toni Preckwinkle
President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners