While browsing the California State Controller's website, I found a notice that while compensation data is available, it is not available online, rather, it is available if they send it to you. Not ideal, but certainly better than nothing. After sending an email on the website, a compact disc arrived after communicating with Ken Press.

The file has the following text descriptions on it:

City, County, and Special Districts Data, as of July 11, 2011. File Types: Excel 2007 (.xlsx) and Comma Separated Value (.csv) I appreciate that Ken readily assisted me and the data arrived relatively quickly. However, it seems to make more sense to publish this data on an ongoing basis.

If this data were available, updated on a weekly basis, the following things would become possible in the public domain due to the effort to make public data available:

changesets of positions staffing across agency staffing within agencies salaries across agencies salaries within agencies. The source file is available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1186808/CityCountySD2011-07-11.csv. If you'd like it in another format, please let me know.