CCT launches local campaign finance database
By Lisa Vorderbrueggen
Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 12:01 am in campaign finance.
Today, the Contra Costa Times launches a brand-new, local campaign contribution database.
For the first time, Contra Costa residents will be able to view a sortable, searchable online database of campaign contributions to candidates for local offices including district attorney, assessor, sheriff and the Board of Supervisors. Until now, voters had to take a trip down to the county clerk’s office and plod through a stack of paper.
Search by race, candidate, amount of contribution, date of contribution, and donor’s name or employer or occupation
We also included, for readers’ convenience, contributions to candidates for Assembly District 15, governor and the 11th Congressional District. (Unlike the local races, the state and federal data is available at Cal-Access and OpenSecrets.org respectively but our site puts it all in one place for our readers.)
We will expand the database throughout the year and will include Alameda County along with cities, school boards and other local races from throughout the East Bay.
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March 14th, 2010 at 7:45 am
For the first time, Lisa Vorderbrueggen is writing a Political Blotter blog on Sunday. That’s likely because the Contra Costa Times, like all employers, is demanding more from their employees to boost productivity, in a down economy.
Thanks to the IT advances, Steve Weir’s Office has provided a sortable, searchable online contribution database, which also boosts productivity.
Our economy will be boosted when jobs now outsourced to China and India come home.
March 14th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Lisa Vorderbrueggen and Daniel (Danny) Willis have been working on this project/article for some time.
We appreciate the kind words, but the credit goes to the CCTimes project.
We’ll take your thanks when we can accommodate on-line filing. (The irony here is that my campaign committee has had the ability to file, on line, for over 10 years. And yet, my office does not have the capacity to receive such filings electronically. So, we create the document, print it, file it as paper, and the CC Elections Office scans it for our official record!)
March 14th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
I’m sure as soon as you’ll get the money for installation and training and the $30,000 / year, you’ll convert to all electronic filings. With the County cutting back on expenses big time, it may be awhile. The files that Lisa and Danny produced are similar in format to the compensation files Dan and Danny produced. There were only 924 compensation entries, but 7213 donation entries.
March 16th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
The database doesn’t seem to work. Maybe its overwhelmed.
March 16th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I just tried it and it is working for me. What specifically didn’t work?
March 17th, 2010 at 11:33 am
The link above takes me to the CC Times site with a “Campaign Finance Header” with nothing on the page. Perhaps its my browser settings, I’ll look into it and report back.