In 2010, two LA Times reporters, Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, kept hearing the same rumor about Bell, California. One of the poorest cities in LA County, under 40,000 people, and supposedly its city manager made $300,000. Maybe $400,000.
They went to City Hall, and Robert Rizzo wouldn't come out of his office. So they filed a public records request and waited.
On day nine, Rizzo called to meet. Gottlieb asked how much he made, and Rizzo coughed out "$700,000." Gottlieb wasn't sure he'd heard right and asked again.
The records said $787,637 a year, roughly twice what the President makes. Council members took home about $100,000 each for a part-time job that, in a city that size, usually pays around $400 a month. Rizzo's defense: "If that's a number people choke on, maybe I'm in the wrong business."
And the council's pay cap? A 2005 special election billed as giving the city more control lifted it, 336 to 54.
The rumor mill had lowballed it by half. Everything was public record, and nobody had asked. The story won a Pulitzer, and Rizzo got 12 years.
Your town has its own unread paper trail (minus the felonies, hopefully). The town Facebook group is 26 comments deep on what's going up next to the CVS. Apartments? Trader Joe's? Somebody blames the mayor. The answer has been on page 74 of a 186-page planning packet since Tuesday.
Close to 3,500 newspapers have stopped printing since 2005, taking with them the reporter who sat through the boring meetings. Today's idea is a source-cited local newsletter that reads council agendas, zoning filings and permits for you. AI flags what changed, and a human checks the source before anything ships. Every item links the original record.
Four local sponsors, 25 pro alert seats, ten listings and a few team accounts get one town of 5,000 subscribers to about $5.4K MRR. Developers already pay outfits like Hamlet and GatherGov for municipal paper trails, and six months of one town's paperwork is a dataset no new competitor can recreate overnight.
Read the full playbook here:
Council agendas, zoning filings and permits are public, and almost nobody reads them. With reporters gone and AI summaries misfiring, the record under the rumor mill is up for grabs.
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