The Chronicle‘s Chase Davis reports that online campaign finance disclosure may eventually make it to Harris County politics:
About six months after Houston officials began filing their campaign contribution and spending reports in a searchable online database, Harris County’s top executive says he wants the county to follow suit.
Faced with the rising profile of campaign ethics as a platform issue in the Harris County judge’s race, incumbent Ed Emmett is proposing a series of reforms, beginning early this year, that he said will make county campaigns more transparent to voters.
Among other proposed changes, Emmett said he intends to lobby the Texas Legislature in 2009 for the power, if not the requirement, to make large counties disclose their elected officials’ campaign filings in an online database, similar to those used by state lawmakers and Houston city officials.
A preliminary review of the issue last month by the Harris County Attorney’s office suggested the county could not make the change without legislative approval.
[snip]
Charles Bacarisse, Emmett’s opponent in the upcoming Republican primary election, announced before his official filing in early December that he would make ethics reform one of the five core issues of his campaign.
Democratic county judge candidate David Mincberg also trumpeted ethics as a central campaign issue when he filed for the race last month.
Bacarisse, who voluntarily posted his July campaign filing on his Web site, called Emmett’s proposals “lip service” and said he will soon unveil his own proposals with the support of state Rep. Beverly Woolley, a Houston Republican.
Since all of the pols seem to agree on the matter (when does THAT happen?), then let’s get on with it! Online, searchable campaign-finance disclosure is long overdue in Harris County.
Apparently, the Chronicle has tried to construct its own database:
The only two U.S. counties larger than Harris County — Los Angeles County, Calif., and Cook County, Ill., — both keep their officials’ campaign reports available in online databases. But here, that information is available only in paper reports, which, unlike databases, cannot easily be searched and sorted, even if scanned and posted online.
Those scans, required of large counties under a 2005 state law, are often searchable only by hand. Therefore, voters curious about how much money a donor has given must comb through stacks of reports in order to total relevant contributions.
The Chronicle has created a database of those paper reports, which is posted online at chron.com.
Great! Would any of our readers be kind enough to supply a link? I can’t find it.
UPDATE (01-09-2008): Here is the link.
