Pasadena Sun
Responding to legal and political pressure to reveal the staff budgets of individual members of the Assembly and state Senate, Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles) unleashed an avalanche of financial information Friday evening that the Legislature had never previously made public.
Though the documents released do not appear to contain actual budget amounts, so there does not appear to be a way to use them to gauge actual percent-of-budget expenditures, at least one observer called the action a positive step for California voters.
Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge) called for the financial disclosure after leaders of his own party slashed his budget in June and ordered temporary layoffs in October for his entire Sacramento and Pasadena office staff. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers filed suit to force disclosure of the financial data.
