Money & Politics | Daily Report

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The end of the California legislative session is once again upon us, and that means it's time for the annual courtship ritual between lawmakers and lobbyists to reach its always-colorful climax.

If you've ever been in the halls of the Capitol during the last week of session, which this year begins next week, you've seen this political theater in action: lobbyists flitting about en masse – in even larger numbers than usual – passing business cards, hobnobbing and trying to exercise what last bits of influence they can before the Legislature goes into hibernation for the winter.

Wouldn't it be nice to see what all those special interests are so riled up about?

Well, for the first time ever, now you can.

Here's the scoop: Organizations that either lobby state government themselves or bring on hired guns to do so on their behalf have long been required to disclose the bills they're lobbying in quarterly reports, known as Form 635s [PDF].

The thing with Form 635s, though, is that the bills and other interests disclosed by interest groups never had to be submitted in any kind of structured format that was easy to search and sort. In other words, if you wanted to see all the organizations that were lobbying, say, AB 52, you were pretty much out of luck.

Until now. By harnessing the power of massively distributed data entry, California Watch has pulled all of the individual bill numbers out of the nearly 7,000 Form 635s filed in the first two quarters of this year and arranged them in a searchable database.

Simply type a bill number into the system and get a list of all the Form 635s that referenced it. It's that easy.

That said, there are a few important caveats to keep in mind.

First, any time you hire human beings to do large-scale data entry, some errors are inevitable. We took a statistically significant sample of our data entry results and found that between 2 and 7 percent of the records in the database likely had some kind of problem caused by human error: mostly typos and omissions.

We fixed the most obvious of them, but the point remains: Don't look at these results as gospel. Each result returned by our database also includes a link to the original reports, so if something looks wrong, by all means verify it.

Second, about 200 of the nearly 7,000 reports we collected have not yet been processed due to various complications. We'll add those as soon as we can.

And finally, we make no promises that the information contained in the reports was entered correctly by the interest groups themselves. The form spells out the filing requirements clearly, but in our past reporting, we've seen organizations that have mistakenly filed Senate bills as Assembly bills, mistyped bill numbers and had other issues. Some groups also did not file bill numbers in some cases and instead filed descriptions of bills, meaning they would not appear in our database.

We're going to continue refining our data, and we plan to update it each quarter as new filings come out. It's not without its flaws, but we think this represents a leap forward from the current system. If you have any suggestions for how we can make it better, let us know.

In the meantime, feel free to explore below. Start by typing in a bill number here. One you hit "Search," it might take a few seconds for results to load.