Editorial: Political donation records should have no online expiration date

Even while he was in the midst of a demanding 2010 campaign, Gov. Jerry Brown raised more than $2 million for two Oakland charter schools he helped establish while he was mayor of that city. What a busy bee!

Those millions were charitable donations, and they didn’t go into his campaign treasury to be spent on pollsters or TV ads or get-out-the-vote drives. But they were political nevertheless.

Many if not most of them came from groups and companies that regularly seek favor with the governor and other top state lawmakers, such as PG&E, Comcast and a handful of casinos. A number of rich individuals and nonprofit foundations gave too. One of them was Texas oil and gas magnate T. Boone Pickens, who wrote a $10,000 check to the Oakland Military Institute.

These are what are known as “behested payments,” meaning that they are made at the behest of an official on behalf of a third party, and they must be reported to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission if they exceed $5,000. You can look for yourself; behested payments dating back to 1997 are posted at www.fppc.ca.gov.

At least, they are at the moment. Under a proposal before the commission, thousands of online records of behested payments reported by statewide elected officials, state legislators, judges and other public officials could be removed from the commission’s website after just seven years — meaning they might be taken down even before a governor or member of the Legislature left office. Financial disclosure forms, in which officials list their assets, investments and income, would also be removed after seven years.

That’s unacceptable. This information enables Californians to connect the dots between politicians and the people or organizations who influence them. Behested payments are just one more tool that moneyed interests can use to influence powerful people. And, unlike campaign donations, there’s no upper limit on these gifts. It’s imperative that the public be able to track these payments over time.

FPPC officials say they have no intention of removing all data at the seven-year mark; they just want staffers to have the option of doing so without getting prior approval from the commission. But why should that be an option? That information should be available online in perpetuity.

The current practice is to destroy the hard copies after seven years but to leave the information up online. There’s a certain logic to that. Storing thousands of paper documents takes a lot of actual space.

Sure, shred the paper files. But set the default for digital data at “indefinite.”

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