Ethics staff demo campaign finance dashboards, outline data limits on developer and lobbyist disclosures

Staff from the San Francisco Ethics Commission on April 8 demonstrated the commission’s campaign finance dashboards and described how electronic filing supports public transparency.

Steven Massey, director of technology services, and Tyler Field, information systems engineer, outlined the commission’s two primary e‑filing approaches: a data-driven NetFile implementation that supports complex, repeatable disclosure across multiple forms, and a more flexible DocuSign form-driven approach used for local filing processes. Massey said the commission has about 52 electronic disclosure processes and that NetFile handles high-volume program areas where data-driven output adds reliability for the public and media.

Field demonstrated the dashboards’ "funds," "spending," "locations," and "occupations" tabs and showed how filters and tooltips let users drill from contest-level totals down to underlying filings. He said one can open a PDF of a filing from the dashboard to check itemized transactions and that recent work replaced campaign finance datasets on the city’s DATA SF portal with more complete records.

Commissioners pressed staff on data gaps. Commissioner Busch asked whether 'behest-of' payments, the lobbyist form’s "purpose" line, major-developer disclosures, slate mailers, and independent-expenditure committee metadata are searchable. Massey and Field said local forms that are e-filed are searchable and that state forms are often scanned and posted; some major-developer and permit-consultant form contents are not yet represented in machine-readable datasets. Staff attributed those gaps to the complexity of certain forms and to contracting and city cybersecurity requirements that have limited vendor onboarding. The executive director said lobbying audits are underway and staff plan to prioritize searchability improvements where feasible.

Public commenters at the end of the presentation urged faster action and expressed broader distrust of city processes; staff repeated a commitment to ongoing improvement and outreach to help reporters and the public use the dashboards.

What to watch: staff said they will continue work to feed NetFile data to the city’s open-data portal and noted a developer/contractor onboarding issue that affects when particular forms become searchable in machine-readable formats.