(An interesting look at some of the data sources around the state. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

It’s almost 2010 and we are deep in the age of technology, but how is this affecting the California political scene? Sure, you can watch Obama on streaming video and you can find raw data on stimulus spending, but where is the governator posting his videos? And where is the discussion about transitioning California State government from a classic model where citizens find public information by culling through paper documents to a government with information open and easily available? Where is (to borrow the phrase) California 2.0? The answer: we're part way there.

San Francisco, as a city, has made huge progress of late toward providing the public with easy access to information in their beta release of the site datasf.org. There you can find city and county data on everything from the useful (election data) to the almost useless (species names for trees) and everything in between.

The Los Angeles City Council, in a move that is a first of its kind, recently approved a contract with Google to begin using its cloud-based email, spreadsheet and word processor services. While this is not quite Web 2.0, this is a step in that direction. Cloud computing is not only tangentially related to the idea of Web 2.0, there is a key linkage in that they both describe an availability of data. With the new configuration, users of the data are theoretically only a few clicks away from publishing it for the public to view. City policy will dictate how or if data is made available to the public, but the framework will be in place to make public data access an easy and cheap option.

Edit by Brian: See the extended for more on California 2.0!

So, if two of California’s largest cities are opening up, what is the state doing? Well, as it turns out, there is a huge amount of publicly available information out there for us to see and play with, courtesy of Sacramento. Here is a brief rundown:

• Office of Legislative Council Data – thanks to a lawsuit by Maplight.org, we now have ready access to a large archive of data on legislative bill information and more. Because of Maplight.org's demads, the Legislative Council made the database available for download, but that’s only good if you’re interested in hosting your own SQL database. Instead,  you can check out Maplight.org’s site where they are hosting the data and making it easily understood. It looks like they only have data available from 2001 to 2004 right now, but they should have information from more recent years available soon.
• LAO Publications– the Legislative Analyst’s Office has their publications available for search on their site. If you’re doing legislative research, this is must-visit site.
• Cal-Access – this is a great site for gathering data on who gave whom money for what. This is the resource people used to figure out who had given donations to the Prop 8 campaign. Not sure if your union is spending your dues they way you want them to? This site can answer that question too.
• Reporting Transparency in Government – this site provides details on state audits, spending and contracts awarded. And as the name implies, this is the site Governor Schwarzenegger made available explicitly for the sake of improving transparency in state government.

The question we can now ask is: is California government transparent enough? To answer that question I tried, as an experiment,  to see if I could find out how many of California's tax dollars have been spent on cost-plus contracts. Well, I couldn't answer that question. I even tried to find similar information on the federal government's page on stimulus spending. While I could certainly find more information on the federal site than on the state transparancey site, neither site provided me with the type of information I was looking for (note: I used the federal stimulus spending site here because it comes the closest of the government-run sites to being ideal).

In due time some entrepreneurs will surely put together a nice little gadget that will access these rough data sources for us. And I'm sure that the information I was looking for is available somewhere online, but it's not easy to find yet.What the federal government has put together to provide transparency on stimulus spending is terrific, but even more great is the fact that the raw data is also available and that tech people can access that data and let us view it in different unique ways and make it easier to search for irregularities. That access to data and the opportunity to present it in different viewpoints is Web 2.0, but I hope to see California improve on what it has already put together.

If you know of a gadget or a web service that has gathered state government data into an easy to use interface, such as Maplight.org, please comment with a link to it below.

Yesterday I noted the insanity of the Big Five process, which subverts representative democracy and good government.

The Big Five process is absurd.  There are ways to decrease the influence of special interests, the biggest being full public financing of all elections.  The best practice is NOT to hide from them so that the legislative process is like a team of burglars trying to rob a jewelry store without being detected.  And the less people involved in any negotiation, the more possibility for eventual corruption through backroom dealing.

Others have piled on.  Greg Lucas has penned an open letter to the budget negotiators, all five of them.

Do none of you find it troubling that the decisions you are making regarding the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars are largely made in private and then announced deus ex machina to us, the public, whose money it is you are allocating.

Seems like there should be some public hearings on what’s happening to the public’s money. There used to be hearings like that. Of course, there used to be conference committees and compromise too […]

Better choices might be found if  some testimony were taken from the 1 million or so aged, blind and disabled poor who not only will not receive a cost of living increase this year but will see their checks rolled back to 2008 levels in order to save $177 million this year and $500 million the next […]

Sure, it’s a representative government and you’re supposed to represent us but most of you were around last year when a record for tardiness was set for passing an alleged budget that was both irresponsible and out of balance in 15, maybe 16, seconds. So, with respect, looks like you can use some help.

Finally, while the Legislature is not subject to the Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act – a drafting error, no doubt – at a minimum some sunlight should be shone on the most important public policy act the state takes: putting together its annual spending plan.

And Jean Ross at the California Budget Project laments what she dubs the cone of silence.

Secrecy in budget negotiations is nothing new. However, the level of secrecy around budget negotiations that reached a new high last summer has been far surpassed by the lack of information in the current negotiations. While rumors fly daily – often several times a day – as to when a vote on a budget deal may occur, these rumors are neither confirmed nor denied by those truly in the know.

The one safe bet seems to be that there will be no public hearings and no opportunity for public input on major decisions that will shape California for years, if not decades, to come. The taxes and spending cuts that are likely to be included will no doubt be drawn from some combination of the Governor’s proposals and plans supported by Legislative Democrats in late 2008.  However, there are increasing signs that additional measures, such as a “hard” spending cap and sizeable tax cuts for the state’s largest corporations, may also be part of the package. The cone of silence has been particularly airtight with respect to “add ons” such as these. No details have been made available to rank and file lawmakers or the public that would enable a critical assessment of the impact they might have on current and future budgets.

This is just not a way to run a government that purports to be a democracy and not an oligrachy.  It’s our money.  Open the doors.

Everything that is corrosive and broken about California politics can be seen in this incredible article by Kevin Yamamura.  In it, he explains that negotiations on the budget are being held by the Assembly and Senate leadership in secret, so as not to upset the critical balance needed to pass it.

Five Californians are trying to solve the state’s budget crisis, in part by keeping the other 38 million residents in the dark.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the four legislative leaders have continued their negotiations behind closed doors for weeks, bypassing open legislative committees and offering the outside world few details as a precondition of their talks.

See, what happens is that the population of 38 million elects 120 representatives to go to Sacramento, and they vest all their power in the hands of four leaders, and they go off to run the state by themselves.  It’s such a brilliant program, not subject to personal ambitions or petty jealousies. Not at all.

Among the people the Big Five are hiding from are their own fellow legislators, and lobbyists:

They fear special interests will mobilize on every proposal they hear about, ramp up pressure on lawmakers and prevent any possibility of reaching a deal that could secure enough votes.

“Whether it’s education or labor or any of the other groups, when we get wind of something that has significant jeopardy for us, we fight against it,” said Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for hundreds of California school districts. “It’s a (lobbying) system set up to defeat the latest idea that’s been hatched, which makes it that much harder to get a solution.”

When they do reach a deal, legislative leaders intend to hide it as long as they can until a floor vote, for fear that lobbyists may undermine the agreement by persuading key legislators to vote against it.

Wow, there’s an honest lobbyist.

So let’s get this straight: budget negotiations are happening in secret, because if they were even remotely public, special interests would scuttle the deal.  And when an agreement is reached, they’re going to SNEAK IT ONTO THE FLOOR so no wayward lawmaker gets in his silly little head that he wants to read it.

The increased secrecy behind this year’s “Big Five” leadership negotiations has made interest groups nervous and has alarmed open-government proponents.

“The thought that to be able to solve this you have to ram it down members’ throats just to lock something up before a constituency finds it outrageous is evidence of how bad the process has gotten,” said Terry Francke of Californians Aware, an open-government advocacy group.

Yep.  Keep in mind that there has not been one Budget Committee hearing this year.  When a deal is reached, that committee will probably meet in the middle of the night and rubber-stamp the deal, moving to the floor as fast as possible to outflank the special interests who clearly run the state.

The Big Five process is absurd.  There are ways to decrease the influence of special interests, the biggest being full public financing of all elections.  The best practice is NOT to hide from them so that the legislative process is like a team of burglars trying to rob a jewelry store without being detected.  And the less people involved in any negotiation, the more possibility for eventual corruption through backroom dealing.

The entire brief for a Constitutional convention can now be “Read A-1 of the Sac Bee on February 4, 2009.”

Open Left’s Paul Rosenberg summarized our site over the past week by musing that California is a failed state.  It’s hard to argue with that.  We have a political system governed in exactly the opposite direction of the will of the people.  Despite 63% majorities in the Assembly and the Senate, in Sacramento the Yacht Party rules.

California is bleeding Republican red as the state’s minority party tries to squeeze a spending cap and pro-business policies from fiscal chaos.

Badly outnumbered and often ignored by the Democratic-dominated Legislature, the GOP is not getting sand kicked in its face these days.

California is hurtling toward a financial abyss, projecting a $40 billion shortfall by July 2010, and no deal can be struck without at least three Republican votes in both the Assembly and Senate.

GOP officials clutch that trump card with relish as the state braces to pull the plug on $5 billion in public works projects and warns it won’t be able to pay all its bills by February or March.

Kind of amusing that the Treasurer thought he was making a threat to Yacht Party regulars when he vowed to shut down infrastructure projects without a budget deal.  To the GOP, that’s a GOAL.  All the posturing and tut-tutting at the lack of compromise, along with the horror stories spun out as a consequence of doing nothing, simply bolster the Yacht Party argument.  If you haven’t been paying attention, they want to do nothing.  They want to end government.  In a way they are the ultimate anarchists.

There’s supposed to be some kind of “cuts only” package released by Republican leaders today, by the way:

The GOP is scheduled to unveil its own proposal Monday, with no tax hike. The plan is expected to identify about $11 billion in budget cuts and, among other things, propose asking voters to redirect money designated for mental health programs and preschool programs and services.

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a Democrat, characterized the high-stakes showdown between legislative Democrats and Republicans as political “chicken,” with each party expecting the other to blink.

“I think they’re going to run off a cliff,” Lockyer said.

Incidentally, Bass and Steinberg are willing to come together on good government reforms, which we shouldn’t oppose in a knee-jerk fashion.  Liberals support reforming government and making it effective because they believe in it.  Republicans, under the guise of “reform,” mean to destroy government.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a performance review that looks at duplication or ineffective programs and seeks to mend them.  That’s what oversight is all about, and it’s a core function of the legislature.  What I do take issue with is the idea that reform is a “magic bullet” that will end all budgetary worries without anyone having to feel the pain.  That’s irrational and ridiculous, especially in this moment of crisis.