Open Government Group

California State Controller’s Office
Local Government Compensation Report

This dataset is a re-presentation of 2009 public employee compensation data extracted from the California State Controller’s Office

You can view the data on the SCO’s site here (bottom of the page) or search it using Simpler’s search engine here. This link takes you to the dataset home page with a simple menu, or you can browse the whole dataset here (it’s big).

This dataset started w/ a suggestion from the Group’s last meeting on Oct 28th. We briefly explored the site during the meeting. Here is more information on the dataset.

Rick Schaffer wrote a program to scrape the data  from the SCO’s site.   Here’s a link to the raw data in CSV format. If you open the ZIP file you can see that the data is in great shape, conforming to a standard of data on the web:  There is little need of metadata. Column names are clear, the dates are available; for the most part the data is complete (with the exception of some pension data). There are no codes in the data that need to be interpreted.

Here is the complete dataset in browse-able format. Excel truncates a spreadsheet at about 65K rows; the complete dataset is 698,272 rows (the number of rows is displayed in the lower right corner of the page). Clicking through the data brings immediate results: filter by clicking anywhere within the sheet; aggregate by clicking on a column heading, then sort in ascending or descending on columns after aggregating.   Mouse over column heads to see the tool tips.

And the data is interesting, even compelling. Everyone can relate to salaries. The minimu/maximum/wages columns starts the story, which continues w/ the pension contribution and the pension deferral. Start surfing the data for fascinating results. Add your questions and comments to this post.