Our Purpose
What do we do?
North Central Illinois Council of Governments (NCICG) is a non-profit entity that provides planning and technical assistance to counties and communities within our six-county area in North Central Illinois. Our coverage area has expanded from the original four counties of Bureau, Marshall, Putnam, and Stark to include services for communities in LaSalle, Grundy, Lee, Kendall, and DeKalb Counties as well. The Council provides low-cost planning services to current member counties and communities and contract services to non-member counties and communities within this coverage area.
Council members pay a nominal per capita membership fee to receive our services at cost. Financial support for the Council and staff is obtained from per capita membership fees, grant administration funds, planning project funds, and other project or administration programs. NCICG receives no state or federal support to provide this regional service and remain in existence.
Our Objectives
We like to consider ourselves full-time professionals for part-time local officials. The Council established the following objectives in 1979 during our beginning that still serve as our primary focus today:
- To maintain the uniformly rural and small town character of the region.
- To strengthen the capacity of local governments in the North Central region through a program of intergovernmental cooperation.
- To provide adequate technical assistance to local governments dealing with problems in financial management, housing, community development, and other areas of concern.
- To articulate the needs of participating local governments and the region as a whole before agencies of the state and federal government.
- To play a vital role in the region’s economic development by helping to attract appropriately sized commerce and industry to the area, assisting in the location of such enterprises, and helping to provide for the needed facilities (water and sewer) to support such development.
- To act as the “grants person” for localities which lack the ability to develop their own programs and help to keep local governments eligible for various grants-in-aid programs.
- To encourage the full participation in the Council of Governments of all government units in the region.
- To promote sound developmental planning to ensure compact communities, requiring smaller public facilities investments, and maximum feasible preservation of prime agricultural land and other natural resources of the region.
Is your community a member of NCICG? If you are in our coverage area and would like to inquire about joining our Council to receive these services at cost, feel free to contact our office by phone at 815-433-5830 or by email at info@ncicg.org