Saturday, May 11, 2013

Campaign Contribution Information

Permanent link to this post:
http://calpensionsbrief.blogspot.com/2013/05/campaign-contribution-information.html

Candidates in California are required to file reports of their campaign contributions with the CA FPPC (Fair Political Practices Commission).  These are available for viewing at http://www.fppc.ca.gov/ ; this is also provided by Sunnyvale at: http://nf4.netfile.com/pub2/Default.aspx?aid=COS .

For example you can view Mayor Spitaleri's filings for his 2009 run at:
http://nf4.netfile.com/pub2/AllFilingsByCandidate.aspx?id=6818843&candidate=Anthony+Spitaleri

Councilman Meyerings filings are available at:
http://nf4.netfile.com/pub2/AllFilingsByCandidate.aspx?id=6818860&candidate=Pat+Meyering

Good luck trying to find what you are after.  For the Sunnyvale site some of the filings can be viewed only by going into the office to view them in person.  The filings available online or in the office are simply scans of the paper filings or the electronic equivalent.  These have to be looked at individually.  Try looking at one to see how hard it is to figure out who got what from whom over the course of the election.  It is doable but it requires a certain amount of dedication.  It has been suggested that the information could be assembled by the state into an online database but this has been resisted so no laws have been passed or funding provided to do it.

Fortunately for Sunnyvale, there is an online summary provided for each politician.  It is here:
http://specialinterestwatch.org/Default.aspx

E.g., For
Pat Meyering: http://specialinterestwatch.org/Pat%20Meyering.aspx
Tony Spitaleri: http://specialinterestwatch.org/Tony%20Spitaleri.aspx

The (losing) opponents' filings used to be available there as well but I get "404" now when I try to access some of them, like Bo Chang's, though I recall it was considerably more than Pat Meyering's - like 5-7 times as much.

This site also has lists filings of independent organizations which support a candidate or oppose a particular candidate.  SUNPac is the (in)famous one that was specifically created to support more high density construction and commercial development of Sunnyvale.

http://specialinterestwatch.org/SUNPAC.aspx

No comments:

Post a Comment