LA City Contracts: A (Mostly) Full Accounting

 That estimate is based on a partial list maintained by the city clerk’s office. The clerk’s office says it routinely asks departments funded by general revenues to supply information on all their contracts. But city clerk staff say some departments don’t cooperate. As a result, the clerk’s office estimates that the contract files it maintains on its website cover only about 85% of contracts paid for by the city’s general fund–and none paid for by the big, independently funded departments like the DWP, airports and Port of Los Angeles. In the belief that shedding some light is better than none, we obtained a copy of all of the clerk’s data and have compiled it into a more easily 2009 LA City Contractor List. Want to know the biggest contracts by dollar amount? How about which departments outsource the most work? How much the Mayor’s office spends on private services? Search away. The information’s all 2009 LA City Contractor List in a highly sortable format.
As time goes by we hope to make the database more complete. In the meantime, you’re sure to find what we think is a pretty good accounting of how the city spends its money on private contracts.
Our Methodology
: AccountableCalifornia.org submitted an information request to the Los Angeles City Clerk for all city contracts. Once we received the list, we removed those contracts that we could clearly identify as non-service contracts (i.e. loan agreements, land-use covenants, financial services, and contracts overseen by the Housing Department). (To see what we removed, click here: 2009 Data Removed.xls) Once these contracts were filtered out, we determined that for fiscal year 2009, the City of Los Angeles had at least 3,000 contracts with private vendors worth $2,257,472,124.