Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission Records

Planning on a regional scale began in northeastern Illinois as early as 1898.  Fatalities from typhoid and cholera by then had reached epidemic proportions in Chicago and nearby communities, the result of using Lake Michigan both for drinking water and sewage disposal. The regional solution was to create the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago to collect and treat the sewage and reverse the flow of the Chicago River.   Regional planning of a broader scope began soon after in 1908, when Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett produced the famous Plan of Chicago.  The plan encompassed a region extending from Kenosha, Wisconsin to Michigan City, Indiana.  To Burnham and his backers in the Commercial Club we owe the Chicago lakefront parks, which occupy 25 miles of the city’s shoreline; the forest preserves along the river flood plains in suburban Cook County; the city’s system of parkways and arterial streets, all planning concepts which have become reality.   In 1923, a group of business and civic leaders proposed forming a permanent regional planning office.  Sponsored by the City Club of Chicago, in 1925 the Chicago Regional Planning Association was established as a private non-profit corporation.  The Association’s area of concern consisted, surprisingly, of nine counties in Illinois, three in Wisconsin, and three in Indiana.   The Association’s program was aimed toward coordinating existing plans and conducting studies.  For more than 30 years it assisted counties and municipalities with problems of street design, zoning, storm drainage, and subdivisions.  It prepared inventories of land use, industrial location, open space, and transportation, occasionally going beyond inventories to prepare regional plans.   In the decade following World War II, the region’s suburban population doubled.  Almost all of this unprecedented growth occurred in subdivisions of single family homes on the peripheries of older cities and villages.   In 1955 the Illinois General Assembly appointed a commission to study the problems arising from this growth.  The specific charge to the Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Local Governmental Services Commission, Rep. Paul J. Randolph (R-Chicago), Chairman, was to make a “thorough study and investigation of the problems incurred in the Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area in adequately and economically supplying to the occupants of such area those services relating to public health, safety, welfare and convenience which are generally considered to be the responsibility of local government.”   Representative Randolph sponsored a bill creating the Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission in 1957 to promote cooperation among hundreds of local governments in solving major growth problems: inadequate transportation, air pollution, disorderly land use, water supply problems, disappearing open space, and recurrent flooding are examples.   The N.I.R.P.C. began operations in 1958 and serves over eight million people in the six county Chicago metropolitan area:  counties in the region are Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will.  Within the region there are over 300 municipalities and 1,000 governmental units.  Illinois Revised Statues, chapter 85, sections 1119 through 1121 provides the statutory base for the Commission and its work. (Taken from the N.I.R.P.C., Annual Report, 1975:  Fifty Years of Organized Regionalism, p. 4.)

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