Web Site May Post Campaign Reports

Easing itself gently into the Internet Age, the City Council is expected to ask the city clerk Monday night to continue efforts to begin posting campaign reports on the city’s fledgling Web site by July 1, 1999.

City Clerk Barbara Kam said Friday that reports would not be available on the Internet by this fall’s City Council election.

Kam said the goal is to set up a system in which the public can log on to a computer, enter a candidate’s name, and pull up all of that person’s campaign reports.

“That is the wave of the future,” said Councilman Jim Friedman. “The future is here. Why should we try to buck the trend of what will be commonplace?”

Currently campaign reports are kept on file in fat binders at City Hall. When citizens want to take a look, they can pore through the thick stacks of photocopied records, or copy pages and take them home.

Council members have said they hope posting the reports on the Internet will make them more accessible.

Kam said there is software available to candidates to allow them to prepare their campaign reports electronically, but that the city cannot require candidates to purchase such software.

She said her hope is that members of the public will eventually be able to access the finance reports and also generate more sophisticated calculations, such as trends in campaign spending, contributions and expenses.

“It is really ironic that this is one of the biggest things going on,” Kam said. “But no one has yet created software that will allow you to generate other kinds of reports from that information, . . . things like how to calculate all the money given in a given election. These are things that our ordinance requires us to do at the conclusion of an election.”