Sacramento Bee editor agrees: CAL-ACCESS is a mess

Our effort to untangle CAL-ACCESS, the state of California’s database of money in statehouse politics, is the subject of today’s column by Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar. Her words:

The secretary of state’s database, intended to allow the public to track campaign money, is virtually useless unless you’re particularly skilled at working with databases and have quite a bit of extra time.

Working with the data is so difficult, Terhaar said, Bee reporter Jim Miller needed outside technical help to nail down his Feb. 6 investigation into the confusing pipeline that fuels statehouse races.

Terhaar goes on to mention our work, and Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s recent denial of our public records request. Read it all over at The Bee.