San Francisco to Bank of New York: 634 mil!

The top city contractor for the city of san francisco is the Bank of New York– they have city contracts for over 634 million bucks since 2004, almost all with the Airport commission…don’t know what this means exactly, and after all what could be wrong with a little cross-costal friendliness.
Why do I know this? I’m integrating the city contracts database, available at the Controller’s office, with the campaign finance database we have at http://whosfundingwhom.org. The first thing I did was download the raw data from the controllers and run some database operations to sort by total amounts. You can also see which city departments are involved in big contracts, and with whom.

My next step is to do a name match on the databases to find out the top campaign contributors who have also been awarded city contracts. What fun we’re having at http://whosfundingwhom.org!

Here’s the top 10:

Vendor	Amount
B N Y WESTERN TRUST	$634,763,741.00
REGENTS OF THE UNIVE	$177,036,142.00
STATE OF CALIFORNIA	$130,532,260.00
CCSF HRD WORKERS COM	$68,921,845.00
MCKESSON	$60,257,539.00

Usual Suspects is the place to read about SF politics

Want to learn about the San Francisco political scene? The best place to start is http://sfusualsuspects.com, which provides a daily listing of the political articles in all of the Bay Area media outlets, including the chronicle, examiner, bay guardian, bay area reporter, and some of the local television station sites.

sfusualsuspects also have a listing of the candidates for the upcoming 2006 races. The Bay Guardian supplements this with a set of candidate interviews for your podcast listening pleasure, and my site, opencampaigns.com, also provides some information on the races, e.g., see the interesting stuff going on in the supervisor district 6 race involving incumbent Chris Daly.

Alex Clemens is the founder of sfusualsuspects. He is a consultant for Barbary Coast Consulting and worked in the Clinton administration.