San Diego crashes its own campaign disclosure website

The city of San Diego's online campaign disclosure system, at one time a stellar model of electronic reporting, now appears to have lost a key vendor and been down for weeks without any public announcement, except for a note on the site that filings would return soon.

Calls to the city clerk's office, the city’s ethics commission, and Netfile, the Mariposa-based online filing vendor that has run the city's disclosure portal for almost a decade, were not immediately returned.

A longtime professional campaign treasurer, who agreed to discuss the matter on background, said she had learned that the city's termination of its relationship with the vendor had been sudden and had come as a surprise.

"They didn't really give a lot of detail," according to this person. "[The city] told me they are not going to support Netfile anymore. When I contacted Netfile, they said the city didn't want to renew the contract."

An early effort to use electronic filing via Netfile stalled out in 2005 after the city manager questioned its then-estimated annual cost of $40,000, but the City ultimately became one of the vendor's first clients.

"The city of San Diego made history with our campaign system, having the first-ever paperless campaign statement filed on January 2013," wrote Netfile vice president Tom Diebert in an April 6, 2020, letter to Garden Grove city clerk Terri Pomeroy.

"The city has an immediate need to continue its contractual relationship with the contractor to ensure that the city's constituents. have uninterrupted access to electronic filing and review of disclosure documents required by the California Political Reform Act and the City of San Diego Ethics Ordinance," says a September 29, 2020 "amended and restated agreement" between Netfile and the city.

An ordinance approving the contract was passed by a unanimous city council vote on October 6 and signed by then-mayor Kevin Faulconer the same day.

The document calls for Netfile to "provide the services, in accordance with the agreed-upon schedule of fees, set forth in Exhibit B, from September 30, 2019, through April 30, 2021."

The contract says the arrangement can be extended "on the same terms and conditions, until September 30, 2021, or later date if the later date is mutually agreed upon by both Parties."

Fees "must not exceed $75,000 for the period from September 30, 2019, through September 30, 2020, and $81,250 for the period from October 1, 2020, through April 1, 2021, unless an increase is approved by the City's purchasing agent, mayor, or city council, as legally required."

The city's current make-shift system has been badly flawed, posting documents without timestamps and omitting years of vital campaign finance data furnished under Netflix, per recent users. The most recent filing as of Friday morning was dated May 13.

A link to what purported to be personal economic interest disclosure filings by city employees, required under state law, went instead to a lobbyist disclosure page.

Would-be electronic filers of campaign and lobbying disclosure reports were told, "filing Campaign Disclosures will be available on eFile-SD by June 2021."

In a subsequent telephone interview, Netfile vice president Diebert said his company bowed out of the competition for a new contract because city officials wanted would-be vendors to bundle a new lobbyist reporting system, with campaign and financial interest reporting modules.

"We wanted to end the life of the lobbyist platform that we had custom developed for them," he said. "We don't do one-offs.  We were basically losing money."

Without the lobbyist reporting system requirement, Diebert estimated the contract for campaign and financial interest filings would have cost the city in the neighborhood of $37,000.

"If it doesn't work out [with the new vendor], I told them we would like to have you back," Diebert said.

A spokeswoman for the city clerk's office who didn't want to be quoted said City Clerk Elizabeth Maland would be back in the office on Monday to provide further details, including whether historic data regarding previous campaign contributions provided by Netfile would be reposted online by the city's new vendor. She added a request for proposal and the final contract with a firm known as Pasadena Consulting were approved by the city council.

The spokeswoman added that during the outage of the reporting site, members of the public could still call the office and request copies of disclosure filings in PDF format.