Two weeks ago we sent you our first newsletter! Since then a ton has happened! Nine new pieces have hit the site, alongside three new maps, our new neighborhood stats page and our brand new Roll Call page, the most accurate measure of your government’s accountability available!

Los Angeles has long lacked an easy way to actually view any sort of realistic and up-to-date attendance record for its council. Until now! The information isn’t exactly secret and the records do exist, but they’re disjointed and strewn across dozens of datasets.

Sixteen officials, one record Share of roll calls present, all bodies, 2023 to 2026

The Basin, from the City Clerk's vote system, the committee journals at lacity.primegov.com, Metro's Legistar, and LAHSA and air district minutes.

Feedback has been unbelievable in the 48 hours since launch, and we’ve got a list of upcoming features we can’t wait to get fully operational. Our first three planned additions landed over the last couple of days, with the big ones still to come!

• Adding council committee attendance
• Adding LAHSA for Bass
• Adding Metro Board & Committees for Bass, Padilla, and Yaroslavsky
• Adding the county board of supervisors!
• Adding LAUSD

Roll Call has been seen by tens of thousands of you already, and we can’t wait to continue its build-out!

This week’s piece on LA’s country clubs garnered over 1.5 million views across all platforms and drove more sitewide traffic than anything we’ve published to date! The piece itself only tells a small part of the story. Twelve country clubs sit on land valued at laughable amounts and contribute nearly nothing to the city services they rely on. We really enjoyed making that one, so that certainly won’t be the last you hear of golf on basin.la.

	Century City on the left, the Los Angeles Country Club on the right. The county values the land under those 40 acres of towers at $258 million, and the 308 acres of grass facing them at $18.7 million. Photograph by Mike-Hope, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Los Angeles Country Club is the clearest case. Its 308 acres are assessed at $24 million and it pays $285,533 a year in property tax. A few hundred yards away, in the identical tax rate area, the Spelling Manor sits on 4.6 acres, is assessed at $112.5 million and pays $1,335,802. That single-family house occupies one and a half percent of the club’s land and pays four and a half times the tax. Across Santa Monica Boulevard, the county values the land under Century City’s 40 acres at $258 million, against $18.7 million for the 308 acres facing it.

	From the piece. West Hollywood is 36 percent smaller than the clubs and pays 53 times the property tax.

Who runs The Basin?

So… who are we? One of the most viewed pages on the site was the About page, which was admittedly lacking. Folks reached out on virtually every platform curious about who “we” are. So last week that About page got an update and a fresh face… Mine. Hi, I’m Miles! I direct and have final say over everything on the site. The team is me, a political junkie masquerading as a data scientist, and an actual data scientist who runs the numbers and checks the math.

	Miles Morton, editor and publisher. Courtesy Miles Morton.

What else were people interested in?

A new map

It draws a single dot per parcel, because at this scale a choropleth hides the thing you want to see.

Politics The SB 79 Map 803,612 city parcels, by whether the state's transit upzoning law reaches them. Open it →

The SB 79 Map is 803,612 city parcels sorted by whether the state’s new transit upzoning law reaches them.

The Election Map also grew since the last issue and now covers 97 contests back to 2020, up from five cycles at launch.

Fifteen council district pages went up at launch. There are now 114 neighborhood pages alongside them, one for every neighborhood the city recognizes, each carrying park acres per thousand residents, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of income, restaurants per ten thousand, and offenses per thousand. Adams-Normandie has 0.15 acres of park per thousand people. Atwater Village has 8.09.

	Four of the 114. Every tile carries parks, rent, restaurants and crime.

Reception

The first issue asked you to forward it since word of mouth is The Basin’s growth plan. That worked better than we could have hoped! Since launch, sitewide engagement has shattered my expectations. The work has drawn over 100,000 engagements across all platforms, and @TheBasinLA on X went from 7 followers to 700 in a week.

We’ll make the same ask once more! If you know a reporter chasing a story or a staffer who needs the number, forward this to them.

We’ve also started the full embed roll-out of basin.la/your-government, the address lookup that returns all of your local elected officials.

If you’re a newsroom, a campaign, counsel or a researcher who needs a set we haven’t published, write to [email protected].

Elsewhere

We’re on X, Instagram and now Bluesky!

Everything in this email came out of a record that was already public, already paid for, and already sitting on a government server…

See you in two weeks.

The Basin
basin.la · [email protected]