The Spreadsheet Link

drilldown on the table in the bottom right corner of of Local Governments

While browsing the California State Controller's website, I found a notice that while compensation data is available, it is not available online, rather, it is available if they send it to you.  Not ideal, but certainly better than nothing.  After sending an email on the website, a compact disc arrived after communicating with Ken Press (disc image will be available [can't find it at the moment]).

The file has the following text descriptions on it:

• City, County, and Special Districts Data, as of July 11, 2011.
• File Types: Excel 2007 (.xlsx) and Comma Separated Value (.csv)

I appreciate that Ken readily assisted me and the data arrived relatively quickly.  However, it seems to make more sense to publish this data on an ongoing basis.

If this data were available, updated on a weekly basis, the following things would become possible in the public domain due to the effort to make public data available:

• changesets of positions
• staffing across agency
• staffing within agencies
• salaries across agencies
• salaries within agencies.

The source file is available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1186808/CityCountySD2011-07-11.csv.  If you'd like it in another format, please let me know.

Are there studies regarding transaction costs for doing business locally, in state, in country, and overseas?  I'd be interested to know:

I received this in a forwarded email.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by
legislating the wealth out of prosperity.
 
2. What one person receives without working for,
another person must work for without receiving.
 
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that
the government does not first take from somebody else.
 
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
 
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not
have to work because the other half is going to take care
of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it
does no good to work, because somebody else is going
to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the
end of any nation.

In determining the overall contribution an organization has to its community, the number and quality of jobs provided seems like a sensible metric.

WIth this thought in mind, some small communities rely more heavily on public jobs.  Thus, when public agencies make cuts to the workforce, those ripples are also felt throughout the community. I'm sure this has been studied more extensively.  The holistic, systemic approach interests me.  Simply, the number of jobs is an important variable when calculating community-level trends.