# Candidate Cities — Data-Availability Recon *Compiled August 28, 2026. Purpose: pick the target city for the whole-org AI-automation-exposure model (the "every FTE, every job class scored" artifact from the shared conversation). All findings verified by fetching live pages/PDFs on 2026-08-28 unless flagged. Fifteen cities assessed across WA, CA, CO, IA by three parallel research agents.* *Selection criteria: (1) budget book lists authorized positions by job classification, (2) salary data by name/title, (3) published class specs / duty statements — the crown jewel for automation scoring, (4) posted union contracts, (5) open data portal, (6) strong local newspaper, (7) tractable entity graph.* --- ## Cross-state synthesis — the short version **Best data, period:** Santa Rosa, CA and Des Moines, IA — both publish authorized-position-by-classification tables (Santa Rosa as a standalone 14-page document; Des Moines inside its budget book) plus full class-spec libraries. **Best in Washington (user's home preference):** Everett and Bellingham, both verified at job-title-level FTE detail — genuinely competitive with the best CA/IA cities at the city-document level. What WA lacks is California's *statewide* infrastructure (mandatory position-level compensation CSVs, LAFCO entity-graph reviews). **Recommended structure:** a primary WA subject (Everett or Bellingham), with Spokane Valley as the contract-city natural experiment, and Santa Rosa as the eventual out-of-state benchmark where the statewide data is richest. --- ## State-level data infrastructure | State | Standardized local finances | Statewide local payroll | CBAs | Entity-graph docs | |---|---|---|---|---| | **CA** | State Controller by-the-numbers | **GCC (gcc.sco.ca.gov): mandatory position-level pay+benefits CSVs for every city/county/special district, 2009–2025, updated weekdays** | MOUs routinely posted (MMBA/council resolution) | **LAFCO municipal service reviews — unique to CA** | | **WA** | State Auditor FIT (portal.sao.wa.gov/FIT): BARS-coded data for ~2,000 local govts | None (aggregators via PRA requests only) | Posted city-by-city | None systematic | | **IA** | DOM standardized city budget forms; data.iowa.gov line-item datasets w/ API | None for locals (state salary book = state employees only) | **PERB statewide CBA repository (iowa-superb.iowa.gov) — every public employer files** | None systematic | | **CO** | DOLA compendium since 1975 | None for locals | Patchy (municipal bargaining is home-rule; SB22-230 covered counties only) | None systematic | Cross-cutting practical note: GovSalaries/OpenPayrolls/OpenTheBooks have name-level pay for essentially every city assessed, but all bot-block automated fetches (403) — plan browser-based or manual collection. Several budget PDFs (Kent, Fort Collins, Cedar Rapids Book 2) are image-only or use subsetted fonts; OCR needed. --- ## WASHINGTON (ranked) ### 1. Everett (~113k) — best data joins in WA - **Budget FTEs:** 2026 book (445 pp., verified): citywide FTE schedule (~1,283 FTEs) + per-department 3-year personnel tables, each title carrying a **4-digit occupation code**. https://www.everettwa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/40026/2026-Proposed-Operating-Budget - **The killer feature:** occupation codes match across the budget tables, the **410-spec NEOGOV class library** (governmentjobs.com/careers/everettwa/classspecs), and the salary ordinance — a clean three-way join of position → duty statement → pay. - **Salary names:** GovSalaries 1,366 employees, 2025. **CBAs:** 6 unions posted. **Open data:** real Socrata portal, data.everettwa.gov, 332 assets. - **Job-mix breadth:** city-run transit (~161 FTE), regional water utility (~250 FTE, supplies ~75% of Snohomish County), fire, library, courts — the richest single-entity variety of job classes anywhere in this recon. - **Moving parts:** Everett Transit/Community Transit merger talks (could remove ~160 FTEs by ~2028); Everett Herald newsroom halved in 2024. ### 2. Bellingham (~93k) — cleanest first-party stack + Blaine synergy - **Budget FTEs:** 2026 Adopted Budget "Budgeted Positions" chapter (pp. ~178–197, verified): every title with FTEs **and bargaining unit**, per-dept union rollups, 10-year citywide FTE history. 1,120.4 FTE total. https://cob.org/wp-content/uploads/2026-Adopted-Budget.pdf - **Class specs:** ~400+ first-party PDF duty statements, filterable by dept/unit/grade: https://cob.org/about/employment/job-descriptions (city-hosted, not NEOGOV-dependent — ideal for scraping). - **CBAs:** all 9 units posted (https://cob.org/gov/dept/hr/labor-agreements); pay schedules by unit also posted. **Salary names:** GovSalaries 1,321 records, 2025. - **Newspaper:** Cascadia Daily News — best local-government newsroom of the six WA cities. - **Entity graph & Blaine synergy:** same Whatcom County graph already partially mapped in the Blaine work (county, Port of Bellingham, WTA, PUD, school district). - **Moving part:** Bellingham Regional Fire Authority ballot measure targeted early 2027 — would move ~220 fire FTEs (≈20% of workforce) off city books. - **Gap:** no open-data portal beyond GIS; everything is PDF. ### 3. Vancouver (~195k) - 12-page "FTE by Fund, Department and Classification" schedule in the 2025–26 adopted budget (verified); **Power BI class-spec library with duty statements, union status, grade, and a bulk Download Data button**; all 8 CBAs posted; The Columbian is a strong family-owned daily. Frictions: Power BI scraping, 2024-vintage salary data, two school districts + fire-district service contract complicate the graph. ### 4. Olympia (~55k) - Title-level staffing tables in budget; **best longitudinal payroll verified (OpenTheBooks names/titles 2017–2024)**; 9 CBAs posted; JOLT News (nonprofit) does granular city-hall coverage. Fatal-ish flaw: class-spec library died in a Workday migration — duty statements need a records request. State-capital workforce distortion. ### 5. Spokane Valley (~107k) — the contract-city natural experiment - A 107k city run on **~118 funded FTEs** (1 employee per 932 residents — lowest of any WA city over 50k). Budget book enumerates every title with an 11-year series and documents the contracts: Sheriff $38.5M, district court, prosecutor, public defender, jail, animal control — 65% of General Fund recurring. Fire = independent SVFD; library = county district; parks/street maintenance privately contracted. First-party specs + pay schedule; no unions found. Wrong as a primary subject, perfect as the comparator: it shows what a city looks like when the org chart is almost entirely edges (contracts) rather than nodes (employees). ### 6. Kent (~135k) — workable but high-friction - 416-pp. budget PDF has no extractable text layer (OCR required; scripted download works via Wayback mirror of https://www.kentwa.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/22805), site bot-blocks scrapers, and department staffing tables are **division-level FTEs only**. - Partial redemption (verified by page-image inspection): the budget **appendix (pp. ~381–389) lists every job classification with 2025 salary steps across 6 salary schedules (~750+ titles** — AFSCME 2617, Non-Represented, Police Teamsters 117, General Teamsters 117, electeds, directors) — the job-class universe exists, but FTE-per-title must be reconstructed from payroll data. - **CBAs: 4 posted** (https://www.kentwa.gov/departments/human-resources/-folder-155 — police are Teamsters 117, not an independent guild; no IAFF because fire is the RFA's). **Class specs: NEOGOV library retired after Workday migration** — duty statements only via Wayback-archived specs, CBAs, and open postings. GovSalaries has 2025 names (but titles blank for 2025; populated 2015–2024). - Entity graph is actually interesting: fire = Puget Sound RFA (since 2010), but Kent runs its **own municipal court and the largest municipal jail in the NW (~122 ADP)**, co-owns Valley Com 911 and SKHHP (interlocal housing), owns the ShoWare arena (ASM Global-operated, PFD board). Library = KCLS. Kent Reporter weekly + iLoveKent blog cover council. - Verdict stands: last of the six as a primary subject (OCR + dead spec library), but its court/jail/interlocal mix makes it a decent seams specimen later. --- ## CALIFORNIA (ranked) ### 1. Santa Rosa (~175k) — best single document anywhere in this recon - **"Position Allocation and Salaries"** standalone doc (14 pp., effective 7/2/2026, verified): every authorized position by dept → org unit → classification, with FTE, salary steps, and bargaining-unit code. Updated intra-year. https://srcity.org/DocumentCenter/View/1213/ - 327 NEOGOV class specs; MOUs for all units; open data portal (opendata.srcity.org); **fresh LAFCO municipal service review adopted May 2024**; Press Democrat is a genuine regional daily. Own water, fire, and transit (CityBus). FY26-27 budget cut 27 positions — deltas trackable. ### 2. Roseville (~155k) — richest entity graph - Budget book contains classification-level FTE with 4-year history (pp. ~367+ of 670, verified). **Largest class-spec library found: 683 specs** (slug `rosevilleca`, not `roseville`). All MOUs posted; two open-data portals; 2023 LAFCO service review + 2025 fire review. - **Municipal electric (Roseville Electric, since 1912, ~130 employees) + city water, wastewater, solid waste, fire, police** — payroll spans lineworkers to librarians, analytically ideal for exposure scoring. Weakness: no real local press. ### 3. Santa Cruz (~62k) — GFOA budget with dedicated Personnel Authorization section; 326 class specs; MOUs posted; CKAN portal; Lookout Santa Cruz (2024 Pulitzer). Small enough to model exhaustively. Akamai bot protection on city site. ### 4. Ventura (~110k) — ~400 job-description PDFs + 8 MOUs, but **no classification-level authorized-position table in the budget** (verified absent across 296 pp.) — counts must be reconstructed from GCC/Transparent California. ### 5. Redding (~93k) — 449 class specs, interesting graph (municipal electric, bus authority, housing authority), but division-level FTEs only, no open data portal, thin press. Most PRA-dependent. **Statewide bonuses (any CA city):** GCC bulk CSVs 2009–2025 (position-level, cross-entity: cities, counties, special districts, K-12, courts); Transparent California name-level records incl. school districts; CalPERS reg 570.5 forces posted pay schedules; MMBA makes MOU posting routine; LAFCO MSRs map the entity graph by statute. --- ## COLORADO / IOWA (ranked) ### 1. Des Moines, IA (~215k) — the sleeper - FY2026 Adopted Budget (verified by text-mining): every division has a **"Personnel Detail: Permanent Full-Time Positions — Job Classification Title"** table with 4 columns of FTE history — the exact crown-jewel format, with prior years for time series. https://www.dsm.city/FY2026%20Adopted%20Operating%20Budget.pdf - Full NEOGOV class-spec library; civil service rules posted; CBAs posted; GovSalaries 2,412 employees (2025); Des Moines Register + Axios. Caveat: fragmented graph — independent Water Works, airport authority, DART transit, regional wastewater authority all off city payroll. ### 2. Iowa City, IA (~75k) — everything on one HR page (all 3 CBAs + all 4 pay plans), NEOGOV specs, compact entity graph; university dominates local employment (useful control). Flipbook budgets + bot-hostile site. ### 3. Fort Collins, CO (~170k) — **publishes its own per-position base-pay open datasets** (2012–2024 lineage) and a classified pay plan by ordinance; great graph (municipal electric + Connexion broadband, Platte River Power Authority, Poudre Fire Authority JPA with published cost-allocation formula). But: no central duty-statement library, offer-based (BFO) budget rather than classification schedules, only police bargain. Open-data portal migrating to ArcGIS June 2026. ### 4. Boulder (~105k) — five published job structures + salary schedules, 3 CBAs, dept-level FTE series to 2008, Boulder Reporting Lab; but no duty statements, OpenGov-app budget. ### 5. Cedar Rapids (~135k) — best CBA transparency (all 8 posted), The Gazette is strong; but dept-level FTEs only, no pay plans posted. ### 6. Greeley (~110k) — workable basics, nothing distinctive; weakest press. **Iowa note:** post-2017 Chapter 20, civilian CBAs are thin (base wages only), but PERB's statewide CBA repository is unique. **Colorado note:** TOPS transparency is state-employees-only; municipal bargaining is home-rule (hence patchy CBAs). --- ## Recommendation **Primary subject — pick one of two WA cities:** - **Everett** if the deciding factor is data mechanics: the occupation-code three-way join (budget ↔ class specs ↔ salary ordinance) makes the position→duties→pay model nearly assembly-ready, and its unusually broad in-house job mix (transit operators, water utility, fire, courts, library) gives the widest range of job classes to score in a single legal entity. - **Bellingham** if the deciding factor is ecosystem: everything is first-party PDFs on cob.org (no NEOGOV/Power BI dependencies), the CBA/pay-schedule/duty-statement stack is complete, Cascadia Daily News provides the narrative layer, and it extends the already-mapped Whatcom County entity graph from the Blaine work — Blaine (6k) and Bellingham (93k) as two specimens on the same county graph is a genuinely nice research design. **Comparator:** Spokane Valley — the ~118-FTE contract city. Scoring its org against a full-service peer quantifies how much of a "city" is actually contract administration, which is precisely the seams-are-automatable insight from the shared conversation. **Benchmark/expansion:** Santa Rosa (or Roseville for the utility-heavy payroll) when ready to test transferability — California's statewide GCC data + LAFCO reviews make it the lowest-friction second state. **Moving parts to watch:** Bellingham RFA vote (early 2027, ~220 FTEs), Everett Transit merger talks (~160 FTEs), Fort Collins open-data migration (June 2026).