It's hard for public to find candidates' financial info

Since 2001, Georgia has asked local political candidates who raise $10,000 or more to disclose the details — who gave it to you, how much, how you spent it — by “electronic means.”

But what exactly does that mean? State law says nothing more on the subject. It might mean filing disclosures in a searchable, user-friendly spreadsheet to be posted online. Or submitting pictures of paper reports by e-mail.

By my count, just six of Georgia’s 159 counties and 535 cities post the disclosures on the Internet. The Georgia Municipal Association has fought bills to mandate such posting, arguing that technologically challenged rural areas would find it a burden.

Disclosure of money in politics is “the best disinfectant to potential corruption,” said Bill Bozarth, director of Common Cause Georgia. But he believes the state has broken its promise to inform the public about the special interests that pay to get candidates elected.

“Right now if you want to see it, you have to go in and find it,” Bozarth said. “It’s expensive and time-consuming.”

No kidding. Last week, I paid $6 to park and pick up disclosures for Atlanta’s mayor and City Council.

The municipal clerk’s office is supposed to open at 8:30 a.m. I sat on the floor outside until someone unlocked the door 20 minutes later. Then I was told that the guy who could burn the files to a CD wasn’t in, so I needed to come back later.

If I’d called ahead, they said, the records would have been ready. I had called the day before, but no one picked up the phone or responded to my voice mail message.

Before the 2009 election, Atlanta posted campaign disclosures on its Web site. But the online reports were incomplete for October and missing altogether after that. Mayor Kasim Reed’s campaign collected $1.1 million after Oct. 25, for example, but none of the details is online.

Nor does the Web site report donations to members of City Council for that period. I can find council President Ceasar Mitchell’s acceptance speech, but nothing on the $188,000 his campaign accepted since October.

I returned a day later to retrieve my disclosures. The city charged me $35. That’s the flat rate to have any city department produce a CD, deputy municipal clerk Foris Webb III said.

Common Cause has tried to fill the void, raising a little over $2,000 from civic associations to put the information on its Web site. The good-government advocacy group paid interns to enter each contribution by hand but it couldn’t afford to post the expenditures, which often can be more intriguing than the donations.

Bozarth said he hopes cities and counties will support a bill requiring local candidates to report campaign finances to the State Ethics Commission, which posts all the information on the Internet. “It allows them to comply with the law in a more cost-effective way,” he said.

But Bozarth doesn’t expect them to.

“They like being in the dark,” he said. “It raises fewer problems for them and people can’t say where the money is coming from.”

The Georgia Municipal Association supports transparency but objects to mandatory online disclosures, spokeswoman Amy Henderson said.

“We are definitely not opposed to ethics,” she said. But smaller cities often cannot afford the cost of computers, software and an Internet connection. “We have some city halls that don’t have faxes,” she said.