One week ago we launched The Basin.

The premise is simple. Every day, the governments of the greater Los Angeles area publish an enormous amount about themselves: everything from the number of metered parking spaces on a single block to thirty-five years of international traffic through LAX. The problem is that almost none of it is readable. It arrives as a rolling archive that deletes last month, a scanned PDF of a scanned PDF, a spreadsheet with a column labeled one thing that contains another. It’s public in the sense that nobody is stopping you. It isn’t public in any sense that matters.

That’s where we come in. The Basin is a publication premised entirely on that data. Every article we write, every map we draw, every interactive we build starts as a record the governments we elect filed about themselves. A basin is the low ground where everything in a watershed eventually collects. That’s the idea.

Week One

• 20 stories, August 13 to August 20, across Money, Elections, Politics and Crime
• 5 maps: elections, crime, donors, LAPD helicopters and 911 calls
• 6 interactives, including a lookup for your own block, the property tax dollar and where each campaign’s votes came from
• 6 films, drawn frame by frame out of public records
• 15 council district pages, one for every seat
• 7 datasets free to download, no request, no account

Elections The Election Map

Over 70 contests at precinct level, 2022 to 2026, each reconciled against the county's certified count. Open it →

The Election Map is the only free precinct-level map of the last five cycles anywhere: over 70 contests, 2022 to 2026, every one reconciled against the county’s certified count. And if you want the long view, we also publish all 41 Los Angeles mayoral elections back to 1896, 62 rounds of voting, with turnout, margins and the undervote.

Your Government

Our flagship tool at launch, and the one we’re most excited about.

The idea is simple. Every one of the 3.87 million residents of the City of Los Angeles is represented by eighteen elected officials, from the Sheriff to the school board. Every one of us also has something we think our government could be doing better, and most of us have no idea who to tell.

That’s not a failure of civics class. The Los Angeles Basin is one of the most politically complex regions on the planet: 88 cities in this county alone, layered over school districts, water districts and a county government bigger than most states, with thousands of responsibilities divided among hundreds of officials and no single door to knock on.

So we built the door. Type an address into Your Government and you get all eighteen at once: neighborhood council, city, schools, county, state, federal. What each office actually handles, and how to reach a person there. It runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, including to us.

Eighteen officials, one address 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood Hills West

Rosters checked against the official sources; boundaries verified against the county registrar's own precinct assignments.

The reception this week was the thing we didn’t see coming, and it changed our plans. So here is the first change: the card is free for any site to carry. A neighborhood council’s, a local paper’s, a council office’s, a mutual aid group’s. One line of HTML, no key, no quota, no tracking, nothing to maintain. The rosters update on basin.la and every embed updates with them. The credit line is the whole price.

Google shut down its Civic Information API in April 2025 and nothing free replaced it. We’d like this to be what replaced it. If you run a site that should carry this, or you know someone who does, the snippet is on the same page, and we will help you install it.

More features land over the coming weeks. Try it, then tell us what’s missing: [email protected]. Think we got a roster wrong, a boundary wrong, a number wrong? Same address. We read everything.

Our most-read story

Film One week of LAPD helicopters

There is no basemap. The city you can see is drawn entirely by the aircraft. Watch it →

For a year we collected the positions the LAPD’s helicopters broadcast over ADS-B. After cleaning: 20,886,139 positions, 8,967 flights, 12,828 observed aircraft-hours. At the City Controller’s own $2,916 per flight hour, roughly $37.4 million of flying.

The piece reached more than 500,000 people across platforms this week, comfortably past anything we’d planned for and past what we’d provisioned for too. Thank you. Genuinely.

Three more from week one

Also this week: most LAPD calls for service aren’t calls from the public, Los Angeles let its Flock contract lapse while 87 surrounding cities did not, five council districts have no Metro rail station at all, and equal turnout would have moved the mayor’s race by exactly one point. If you’d rather poke at it yourself, there’s where each campaign’s votes came from, the strongest neighborhood for each candidate, and who pays to lobby Los Angeles, every client that has paid a registered lobbying firm since 2005.

New this week: the films

We opened the media desk with six films built frame by frame out of public records. No stock footage, no narration, and no basemap wherever the data can draw the city by itself:

• Los Angeles builds itself Every parcel in the basin, drawn in the year the building standing on it today went up. 1900 to 2025, at two and a half years a second.
• A day of parking tickets 15 October 2020, every citation appearing where and when it was written. By midnight the tickets have drawn the city.
• Where Los Angeles flies Thirty-five years of international traffic at LAX, one month at a time, 244 destinations competing for ten places on screen.
• Plus one week of LAPD helicopters, four cities, one week, and who flies Los Angeles abroad.

They’re built to be watched on a phone and shared. Please do.

The data is free, and so is telling us we’re wrong

Seven of our datasets download free right now, no request and no account: the ALPR camera census, the county contract-services ledger, the cost-of-living series back to 1940, the police and fire comparison panels, the true cost of every city department, and the Oak Pass file. Each zip carries the CSVs plus one plain-text document with the method, the column meanings, the sources and the licence.

The rest of the catalogue is licensed, and that is what pays for the free half. If you’re a newsroom, a campaign, counsel or a researcher who needs a set we haven’t published, write to [email protected].

And our corrections policy is one sentence long: we recompute every figure from the source records before publication, and some of them are still going to be wrong. If you think one is, tell us which and we’ll recompute it from the source. Corrections get fixed in place with a dated note. Nothing quietly disappears.

Parking.

Los Angeles collected $4.74 billion for parking a car over the last fifteen complete fiscal years, and we have the parking occupancy tax going back to 1991. We also have 126.7 million sensor events from 7,685 metered spaces, three years of them. That matters more than it sounds, because LADOT publishes the archive on a rolling window that deletes the oldest month as it adds a new one, and the Internet Archive never captured a single file. Outside the current window, that record does not exist anywhere. Except here.

Come find us

We’re stepping up on social this week: @TheBasinLA on X and @TheBasinLA on Instagram. The maps and the films are made for Instagram. The numbers are made for X. You can also take the RSS feed if that’s more your speed.

And if you know one person who’d want this, a reporter chasing a story, a staffer who needs the number, a neighbor who argues about this stuff over dinner, forward it to them. We don’t buy ads. Word of mouth is the entire growth plan.

One last thing. Every figure in this email came out of a record that was already public, already paid for, and already sitting on a government server where almost nobody could read it. That’s the whole job. Not finding secrets, but making the things hiding in plain sight legible.

See you next issue.

The Basin
basin.la · [email protected]