Without notice to the public, the Urbana Open Data Portal was shut down after nearly 10 years of service. 

Urbana residents and the general public could use the portal to explore over 30 datasets, including city finances, housing, police incidents, arrests and more. Users who tried to access the portal this summer were instead met with an error, as the website used no longer exists.

But last spring, users were met with a “This site can’t be reached” message.

Instead, city web pages now direct visitors to the state’s data portal, where Urbana currently has only 11 datasets available — some of which haven’t been updated in years. When it first transitioned to the state, only six datasets were reuploaded over the summer; missing was key public safety data, including arrests dating back to 1988.

Thomas Webb from the city’s IT department said, despite the changes, the new data portal will be just as informative as the previous version. He said the old portal was a paid service and tracked only Urbana’s data, but the state’s portal offered a way to save on that service and improve functionality.

“The previous portal was a paid subscription service,” he said in an email to CU-CitizenAccess. “When the State of IL subscribed to the same vendor and offered the ability to save our data there, there was no reason for the City to continue paying an additional subscription fee. In the new portal, individuals can access the raw data or build visualizations in any way they would prefer.”

Like the previous portal, which featured a similar interface to analyze a variety of information, the state portal offers several improvements and updated functionality. Among the currently available datasets are nuisance complaints, city budgeting, and others. In recent months, the city added police data, which has not been updated since early 2023 and was missing after the service change.

CU-CitizenAccess previously reported on racial disparities in traffic stops by Urbana Police using the data available on the data portal. This data still has not been updated since early 2023, despite being uploaded to the state portal.

The 2015 portal, developed under the leadership of Sanford Hess, Urbana’s former information technology director, had ambitious goals and “hopes that the data portal will help people look at data, quantify it, and find their own answers.”

Webb was one of the few people in the process of transitioning from the old data portal to the new one provided on the website.

“As I understand it, we see fewer FOIA requests, which to me is an indicator that people are finding the information they want is readily available,” Webb said. “The interface is just no longer customized to the City of Urbana and is shared across all the municipalities that use the site.”

The Urbana IT Department is not the primary manager of the transition; rather, its role has been largely technical and limited in scope.

“IT is only responsible for basic sanitization and uploading of the data to the site … The transition was just a change of hosting providers; it was not intended as a change of the data the City is providing,” Ross McNeil, the city’s Freedom of Information Act Officer, said in response to a request by CU-CitizenAccess filed when reporters noticed dozens of datasets were quietly removed.

These data portals are essential not only for Urbana residents but also for those in neighboring cities such as Champaign, according to Tyler Rainey, the regional planning commission’s technology director. Rainey emphasized the importance of maintaining accessible public data.

“Data Portal visitors can utilize the data for public oversight, research and development, community action, and education/skill building … Information on transportation statistics, current development projects/construction permits, air quality reports, and nuisance complaints can be found in government data portals,” Rainey said.

The county commission’s data portal organizes information by category, making it readily available and easy to find for the public.

As for Urbana, Webb said there are two challenges ahead for what the IT department has planned for the data portal: keeping the data updated and in context. 

“We’re on a regular cadence for updates, but it takes time and can sometimes get missed as we work on other projects,” Webb said. “The second … is that raw data can be misleading without context. Whether it’s the newest medical study or data on an open data portal dataset, numbers always only tell part of a story. The challenge is sharing that context.” 

More updates for the data portal are planned going forward. Webb said they have no plans to change the data portal service and that this one is here to stay.