Brad Messer Commentary
Monday, June 2, 2003

Council Campaign Funds Smokescreen

San Antonio makes sure it is extremely time-consuming to look up city hall campaign finance reports.

A private citizen named Jay Kumar decided to do something about it. He went through many of the reports from recent campaigns, and put the numbers in a searchable database. I have a link to the database on my website at bradmesser.com.

On his cover page, Mr. Kumar describes the situation well. Here are excerpts:

The city ... simply scans the pages of the reports and saves the images in PDF format. As a result, these reports cannot be searched ... Due to software constraints, only data contained in typewritten campaign reports have been compiled. Since most candidates' reports are still filled out by hand, the majority of available reports cannot be processed.

Bonnie Conner knew about this and did nothing. Carroll Schubert knows and does nothing. Ditto the mayor and other holdovers. Rather surprising how many of our local politicians aren't in the computer age, isn't it. In the near future I will report on which candidates filed the obscure handwritten reports because they were apparently unable to borrow a computer.

Brad Messer, commentary, KTSA.

City of San Antonio Campaign Finance Reports - database created by citizen Jay Kumar

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