Thank you for a great 2018!
As 2018 comes to a close, we wanted to thank all of you for helping make this year our most successful ever!
We posted over 2 million new pay records to the site and received over 57 million page views last year — an all-time high!
But our biggest accomplishments were the positive reforms that came from increasing transparency in government.
- Transparent California enabled teachers in one LA school district to help uncover a massive fraud.
- Our research team exposed how elected officials in the working-class town of Madera approved an excessive and unjustified pay raise for staff, then attempted to hide that fact from the public. Armed with this information, residents demanded — and got — an outside audit.
- The City of Riverside implemented a series of reforms after our report on a dispatcher who earned $373,235.
- The City of San Diego’s Internal Auditor chastised the city for not disclosing complete benefits information, as we explain on our site. The council agreed with the findings of the report, and has directed the city to provide complete information going forward!
- [In Progress] Despite California state law emphatically declaring that governmental records are presumed public, the state pension fund CalPERS refused to provide the one-word description [regular or disability] of the pension benefits paid to members. This information is critical to uncovering waste, fraud and abuse, much like what has already been found at the many other pension funds that do disclose this information. In order to ensure CalPERS complies with the plain language of the state’s open records law, we filed a lawsuit to obtain this information in August, 2018.
The below video captures a few of our greatest hits, but to see the full list of what we were up to this year, be sure to visit the official Transparent California blog by clicking here!
Thank you so much for your support, and we look forward to achieving even more in 2019. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’s!
