Transparency in government, thanks to Foothill Cities

Dauntless civic crusader Centinel over at the Foothill Cities blog (along with reader AA) has been able to tame the bane of every local government reporter and concerned citizen: The dreaded Form 460.

These are the forms used by all state elected officials to report their quarterly campaign contributions and expenditures. Until now, anyone interested in finding out who gave what to which politician had to go to their local city clerk's office and rifle through page after page of at times incorrectly filled out and chicken-scratch covered forms. And if you want to make copies, you better have your wallet (or purse) handy.

Well Centinel and AA have done all the work for the rest of us, at least when it comes to Mayor Bill Bogaard in Pasadena. Their handy database covers 2006-07 and allows the user to not only go through the mayor's list of contributors, but to "visualize" the data using various parameters including zip code, occupation, name, etc. For example, a cursory review of the data set reveals that most of the mayor's contributions came from the 91105 zip code in West Pasadena, and that retirees made up the largest identifiable group of the mayor's contributors based on occupation ($16,500).

Having myself gone through enough 460s to choke a large elephant, I can say these two should be commended for the time and effort that it has taken to put this information together. They promise additional data sets in the weeks to come, and I look forward to them eagerly.

Centinel also notes the excellent system in place over in Los Angeles, where all campaign filings are done electronically and can be sorted by a variety of criteria, for free, by the public at http://ethics.lacity.org/efs/. I have to agree that a city of Pasadena's stature should look into investing into a similar system. Even neighboring Glendale has a rudimentary electronic database of scanned 460 forms which can be accessed here. Of course, one has to go through each candidate's full filings in order to find the information one needs (and deal with the chicken-scratches along the way), but it sure beats schlepping down to the city clerk's office.