About The Basin
The Basin is a political data publication covering Los Angeles and Southern California. We build datasets from public records, write about what they show, and license the cleaned, joined data behind the work.
Miles Morton, a former legislative staffer with the LA City Council, founded The Basin to report on local government from public records: campaign money and who gives it, how the council votes and who shows up to vote, where the budget goes, how the city answers a call for service, and where crime stands. Nearly all of it is already public. It just sits in dozens of agency systems, in formats never intended to be an easy read.
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Reach us at data@basin.la.
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Publisher. The Basin is an independent publication based in Los Angeles, California. It is not affiliated with any government agency, campaign, candidate or committee.
Copyright and reuse. All original content on this site, including articles, charts, and interactive maps, is © 2026 The Basin. You may quote from our work with attribution and a link. Republication in full, or commercial reuse of our datasets, charts or maps, requires written permission or a license from data@basin.la.
Underlying records. Our work is derived from public records published by government agencies, including the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, the City Clerk, the County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, the City Administrative Officer, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Fair Political Practices Commission, MyLA311, the Statewide Database at UC Berkeley, and the U.S. Census Bureau. The underlying facts are public and remain so. Our compilations, cleaning, joins and documentation are original works of The Basin, and each dataset release carries its own attribution and license terms.
Accuracy. Content is provided for general information. We verify our figures against source records before publication, but disclosure regimes undercount by design and government records contain errors, so figures should be read with the stated methods and limits of each piece. All content is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, and The Basin disclaims liability for decisions made in reliance on it.
No advice. Nothing on this site is legal, financial or investment advice, and nothing here is an accusation of unlawful conduct. Where an article describes disclosed payments or filings, the conduct described is lawful unless the piece states otherwise.