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CEGI: 4.0 CEGI Wish List

This is a list of databases and documents that are not available over the World Wide Web, or by dial-up bulletin board. Not all of them should be made available, in the interest of privacy or public safety. Many of them, however, would be very valuable to citizens interested in evaluating the effectiveness of public policy and their elected officials. See below for information on how to add to this list.

This is also where I will post some of the requests for URLs I get for California Electronic Government Information folks feel ought to be on the web. I'll only quote messages sent directly to me, with names deleted. If you know how to find this information, let me know, and I'll pass it on, and add it to the List!

Docs & Databases

Survey Of State Databases, (http://www.ca.gov/gov/gcit/survey.html) from the Report of The Governor's Council on Information Technology. These are existing relational databases with and without electronic access (for government offices). Agencies mentioned are:

• Air Resources Board
• Board of Equalization
• Corrections
• Developmental Services
• Employment Development
• Energy Commission
• Health Planning & Development
• Mental Health
• PERB (Public Employment Relations Board?)
• Pesticide Regulation
• Social Services
• Toxics & Substance Control
• Waste Management Board
• Water Control Board
• Water Resources
• Youth Authority

The new state entries were submitted by Ray Kiddy <ray@svpal.org>. An attempt at a complete list of all web servers in the ca.gov domain tied to the agencies publishing information is at http://www.ganymede.org/agencies.html (CA Govt Agency and Commission List). The list also includes other agencies that are NOT publishing on the Web.

Your Requests

The agency in charge of birth and death records is the Office of Vital Records. Their main telephone number is 916-445-2684. They can send you certified copies of birth, death, marriage, or divorce certificates. They can receive requests via mail or by fax. There is an extra charge for answering a credit-card-paid request that is sent in via fax, but they answer the request much more quickly. Note that if you know the County of the occurence of the event, the County Recorder's Office also has these records.

I have no idea what this agency's plans are in re Internet access. If anyone has contact for an actual person, as opposed to a voice mail system, I would be willing to follow up on this. - rrk

The (current) Governor would prefer you write to him via the USPS. -CM

Also, you can fax to him (as most of us with Internet access also have fax modems), at: 916-445-4633. - rrk

Actually, the Department of Insurance does have a presence, at http://www.insurance.ca.gov. They just got this site up recently. If you are interested in what you see there and would like to ask for more substantive information and for, as an example, the ability to file complaints from the web site, please contact them and encourage them to do be more proactive in what they use the Web for. - rrk

The Code of Regulations is most definitely NOT on the Internet. The State signed a contract a few years back (not sure when...) with a publisher (Barclays, I think) that gave this publisher exclusive rights to re-publish the Code of Regulations. There has since been a law passed, specifically AB 141 (Bowen), that would make this kind of contract illegal, but there is nothing we can do about this until it expires, which I believe will occur in 1998.

There is more information available about this, but not right at my fingertips. If you are interested in hearing more, please e-mail me. - rrk

There are no current plans to put this info, kept by the Secretary of State, on the Internet. There was, until it was killed just a bit ago, an effort to put campaign finance records, also kept by the Secretary of State's office, on the Internet. If you are interested in knowing more (perhaps much more) about this situation, I know that Kim Alexander, of the California Voter Foundation will be putting up some information soon.

One reason why the corporate name data requested here may not go up anytime soon is that there is definite interest by private companies in selling access to this information and the Legislature, particularly the Republicans in the Assembly, are adamant that governmental information publishing should not hurt businesses who are doing the same thing. I do not defend this, I am merely explaining it.

The web system at the State Controller's Office lists the e-mail address found in the CEGI "State" list, but there are no e-mail addresses for specific personnel in the web page.

In early June I was at the SCO office and asked some of the people there when they would really be using the Internet. I asked specifically about having all of them able to receive e-mail and also about publsihing reports on the web, such as the then-just-released report on the results of the Whistle-Blowers 800-number that was set up for people to report state governmental activities that violated the law or adminitrative rules.

They said it would be "about a year" or so when they would be able to do these things. If anyone wants to call them and encourage them to make this a higher priority for them, please feel free. The more the merrier. - rrk

Of course, the California Association of Realtors is not a public agency and has no responsibility to release this list, if they have it. I would suspect they were worried about their list getting stolen. Selling real-estate is very much a information-based business. In general, the CAR is trying to make sure that data such as property assessment data, lists of licensed sellers (who may not be CAR members...) and such are not made available in a form that is easy for regular people to acquire.

As long as real-estate agents have some measure of exclusivity in the information they can access that we cannot, for that long will they be assured of having jobs.

Another bill is going through the Legislature right now that will amend the Business and Professions Code to require the state to keep a register of licensed accountants. I have suggested to the author that he consider making this list available over the Internet and I have not received a reply from his office.

Meanwhile, you might want to check out the Taxpayers Assets Project, to find out about their work on making Federal databases available. WWW: http://essential.org/tap/tap.html. Subscriptions to their Internet Distribution List TAP-INFO are available by sending an email message to <listproc@essential.org> with the following message: subscribe tap-info your name. TAP's Crown Jewels Project inspired this Wish List.

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California Electronic Government Information. Copyright 1997 Chris Mays. Version 19970301