Topline:
CalMatters created a tool that allows anybody to explore the assets, gifts, and travel disclosed by state lawmakers.
Why it matters: In 2024, interest groups gave nearly $250,000 worth of gifts to California legislators and spent more than $820,000 taking them on trips across the world, according to annual financial transparency reports filed in March. That’s less than they gave in 2023 when lawmakers received $330,000 in gifts and more than $1.1 million on sponsored travel.
Gifts: Legislators have to disclose any gifts they receive worth more than $50; if they received more than $590 in gifts from a single source in 2024 then they had to report it and reimburse the difference between the value and maximum gift amount to the gift-giver. In total, 108 legislators reported receiving gifts from more than 450 different sources last year, and 12 officials did not report receiving any gifts.
Read on... to use the tool to explore what was disclosed by lawmakers.
In 2024, interest groups gave nearly $250,000 worth of gifts to California legislators and spent more than $820,000 taking them on trips across the world, according to annual financial transparency reports filed in March. That’s less than they gave in 2023 when lawmakers received $330,000 in gifts and more than $1.1 million on sponsored travel.
Using the reports, CalMatters created a tool that allows anybody to explore the assets, gifts, and travel disclosed by state lawmakers. Enter your address in the tool below to see what your representatives reported.
Sponsored travel
Organizations can pay for the travel of an elected official to a destination within California or beyond for educational purposes that often include touring a facility, going to a conference or learning about a policy issue. These organizations can also invite lobbyists or other guests to accompany legislators on these trips, allowing special access that is often undisclosed to the public.
In 2024, just like in 2022 and 2023, a nonprofit called the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, also known as CFEE, paid the most to take state legislators on trips to locations that included the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Taiwan. The group spent nearly $260,000 last year to pay for the travel of 42 legislators, almost one-third of all the money spent on lawmaker travel in 2024.
Assemblymember Damon Connolly, a Democrat from San Rafael, went on eight trips that cost $27,000, the most of anybody in the Legislature, while 28 officials didn’t report any travel. Connolly’s largest trip patron was CFEE.
Gifts
Legislators have to disclose any gifts they receive worth more than $50; if they received more than $590 in gifts from a single source in 2024 then they had to report it and reimburse the difference between the value and maximum gift amount to the gift-giver. In total, 108 legislators reported receiving gifts from more than 450 different sources last year, and 12 officials did not report receiving any gifts.
The single largest source of gifts last year was the California Democratic Party, which gave more than $27,000 in gifts, mostly as retreats and food, to 71 state lawmakers, including some Republicans.
About the data
State law requires every elected official to submit an annual financial transparency report each March to disclose any stocks, property or businesses they own, as well as gifts, sponsored travel and other income they received the previous year.
The documents, called Form 700s, are published by the Fair Political Practices Commission on their website as PDF files. We downloaded all of the reports filed by state legislators and used a Python script to crop each field on the form and then used OCR (which stands for Optical Character Recognition) to extract the value. Finally, we compared the extracted data to the original reports to verify accuracy.
You can download the data here.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
