Most St. Petersburg mayoral candidates blow off transparency request
July 28, 2009 at 2:16 pm by Wayne Garcia
The state of Florida’s searchable campaign database
The St. Petersburg Times tried to do its job; it asked each and every St. Petersburg mayoral candidate if they would supply their campaign finance information (their contributions and expenditures) so the newspaper could create a searchable database for voters to use, just like candidates for national, county or state office do. But not the city, which puts up only .pdf’s of the reports, which cannot be searched for names that contribute to different campaigns or to do other important analyses of who is funding whom.
If you’ll recall, that is one of my six ideas to fix Tampa Bay politics on a recent cover of Creative Loafing.
With one exception, however, the Times‘ request fell on deaf or uncaring or incapable ears. From A-Sharock today:
We’ve been told by computer experts that providing this data would take as little as 15 minutes of work.
The response from candidates: Silence.
Only Scott Wagman’s campaign attempted to comply with our request. Candidate Bill Foster said he didn’t think it was technically possible and candidate Larry Williams declined. The other candidates didn’t even respond to our request.
