The California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), the state's ethics and money in politics watchdog, says that a payment is behested if it was made:
- At the request, suggestion, or solicitation of, or made in cooperation, consultation, coordination or concert with the public official; and
- For a legislative, governmental or charitable purpose.
The commission has a webpage to download behested payments as an Excel file but the data seems delayed and has known errors.
The FPPC has a web search tool for behested payments that doesn't seem to have the same issues as the downloadable Excel file. Here's an example of the web search tool: payments behested by Gavin Newsom in 2024.
An example of a known error in the downloadable data is a $5,000,000,000 behested payment from the Waverley Street Foundation to California Volunteers in May 2024 though the FPPC's web tool for searching behested payments states that the value is $5,000,000, which makes a lot more sense and is used in this data set.
This dataset is simply one CSV with all the behested payments pulled from the correct web search tool. It spans 2011 through the present.
These are the columns that can be found in behested.csv.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Official's name |
| Amount | Behested payment amount |
| Payment Date | When the behested payment was made |
| Payor | The party that gave money |
| Payor City | The giving party's city |
| Payor State | The giving party's state |
| Payee | The party that got money |
| Payee City | The receiving party's city |
| Payee State | The receiving party's state |
| Description | A description of the reason |
| Notice Received | When the FPPC received the filing reported by the official |
| LGC Purpose | A behested payment must be for one of the following reasons: Legislative, Govermental, Chartiable |
If you use this dataset, please mention it was collected and cleaned by CalMatters. If you have any questions about this dataset, feel free to contact us.
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