We don't often pull back the curtain on our work here at Bay Buzz. But we wanted to let you know about something we hoped to put together for this mayor's race. Hoped being the key word.

For national and state elections, there is a Web site you can visit (run by the government) to track election contributions. You can type in the names of potential contributors and see whom they gave to. For instance, you can track the contributions of the Sembler Co. or Craig Sher or anyone for that matter.

In some cases, you can track the contributions by ZIP code or even address.

The point is, you get a much better picture of who's giving and who's getting.

At the city level, you get none of that. Candidates provide pieces of paper, which are then scanned in by the city clerk as a PDF. There's no searching, no tallying, no sorting available.

Bay Buzz hoped to change that. Hoped, again, being the key word. We asked each of the major candidates to provide campaign finance reports in a manner that can be uploaded to our Web site for everyone to search. We asked only for the data that had already been provided to the clerk, only in a different format. (The best example is rather than giving us a paper printout, they give us a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in an e-mail attachment. We already have the paper, of course).

We've been told by computer experts that providing this data would take as little as 15 minutes of work.

The response from candidates: Silence.

Only Scott Wagman's campaign attempted to comply with our request. Bill Foster said he didn't think it was technically possible. Larry Williams declined. The other candidates didn't even respond to our request.

Too bad.

Aaron Sharockman, Times Staff Writer

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