You want it when?

IT TOOK A LITTLE TIME, but the point is that it didn’t take forever.

Times reporters Jack Leonard and Doug Smith grew weary of waiting for Los Angeles County to fulfill its commitment to make campaign contribution data easily available for public scrutiny. So the reporters and their editors did it themselves, hiring a company to computerize the records for $6,300. That’s less than what the county registrar-recorder/clerk’s office, with an annual budget of about $120 million, spent last year on “household expenses.”

Then the Times built its own searchable database -- in four months. That’s less time than it often takes a county department to “report back” to the Board of Supervisors on a policy question. And it’s far less time than it has taken the registrar-recorder/clerk to follow the board’s directive to take candidates’ campaign filings and actually post them online as a searchable database.

The subject came before the board in the fall of 2005 after The Times reported that a campaign finance law passed by voters in 1996 had been virtually ignored by the county. Candidates were filing their records, but no one was monitoring the data for compliance. The article embarrassed the supervisors, and Registrar-Recorder/Clerk Conny McCormack told them that she would put together a searchable database. Eighteen months later, the project still isn’t done.

McCormack says she’s doing the best she can, given other commitments, such as updating voting systems. So if you wanted to know who was donating money to the last winning campaigns of Supervisors Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky, Sheriff Lee Baca and Assessor Rick Auerbach, you had your choice of leafing through the paper documents at McCormack’s office in Norwalk or calling up copies, one by one, online. If you wanted to search by donor -- like you can in the city of L.A. and state of California -- to quickly find how much a candidate is beholden to any single contributor or whether donors complied with the $1,000-per-candidate limit that voters adopted a decade earlier ... well, too bad. Take a number.

McCormack promises her searchable online database will be ready by July 2. But even then, it will only allow users to check for donations made since January. This syrup-like pace calls into question how serious the elected supervisors were about wanting to open their campaign data to scrutiny. If public access to data within the fortress of county government were a priority, the project could have been completed by now.

Or, perhaps, even if the supervisors wanted the county bureaucracy to move faster, they were incapable of coaxing it into action. If that’s the case, it forecasts a very long wait indeed for movement on gang violence, hospital reform, care for the homeless and a host of other services for which county government is responsible.