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CAPITOL
New Web site allows citizens to check on gov’t performance
BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Press

    New Yorkers are well known for complaining about politicians and government, their motives and performance.
    Now you can investigate those suspicions yourself.
    Project Sunlight, a Web site created by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo under a law passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, puts better government accountability a click away. It has stripped away the bureaucracy that has kept much of how public policy is influenced secret from the public.
    Data on state and most local elected officials can be investigated through the Web site (http://www. sunlightny.com/snl1/app/index. jsp).
    The site can also be accessed through Cuomo’s home page (http://www.oag.state.ny.us).
    The data isn’t new, said Blair Horner, Cuomo’s public integrity official in charge of the site. But the site compiles the public records in a useful format including campaign finance documents, lobbying disclosure reports, the text and supporting arguments for legislative bills, the elected officials who sponsored them and how much cash their campaigns received from the lobbyists pushing the bills.
    To duplicate what the Web site allows in a few minutes, a searcher would have to visit several Web sites or examine paper files in local offices. The result has been that few, outside of news organizations and campaign committees, ever examined the data that shows how effective politicians and government can be — and who influences the decisions.
    Drawbacks, however, include the lack of a historical tracking: Most records date back only two or three years. That’s something that Horner says may be addressed in coming years.
    Horner guided reporters through the site and its new offerings last week. Here’s how it works:
    Pick a bill number or, lacking that, do a key word search for the topic, or search bills sponsored by a specific legislator.
    The site will give you the bill numbers. Just click to get the bill text, the supporting memo in plain English, and all the sponsoring legislators. You’ll also find out where the bill is in the process — whether it’s stuck in committee or signed by the governor. The data also shows if the measure would cost taxpayers anything.
    The screen also shows which lobbyists and which firms lobbied for or against the bill. You can then search the lobbyists and his or her fi rm, find out how much they were paid and when they lobbied for the bill. You’ll also get their phone numbers and addresses.
    From there you can search any of the bill’s sponsors and pull up of his or her campaign contributions, sorted by whom or how much. You can also watch for “bundling,” the practice in which many small, easily overlooked contributions are all sent from the same business address, often on the same day. The campaigns already knew which business favored them in by bundling. Now voters can, too.
    You can also check the porkbarrel spending by the elected official, how much he or she directed back home and to which organizations.
    Many of the benefactors of these “member items” are charities. You can use the Web site to pull the Internal Revenue Service 990 reports that show how much a charity takes in, how it’s spent, and who their top employees are along with their salaries. Such reports have been the basis of newspaper stories in which member items were sent by lawmakers to charities employing their relatives.
    The site also provides a list of bills each lawmaker has sponsored, with links to explain what the bills were about.
    Much of the data can now be exported into spreadsheets where a user can shuffle and compute the data to reveal patterns and trends or to link spending and bills with campaign contributors.
    A tutorial on the Web site also helps users explore the site.