By Jim Sanders, Sacramento Bee

The state Assembly and Senate released current member-by-member spending records Friday, less than one month after the lower house denied public access to the data.

The action is a concession that taxpayers have a right to see up-to-date breakdowns of how funds have been spent through July, rather than year-old statistics that typically are released each November.

But the data released Friday provide a cloudy picture of expenditures. Key documents remain undisclosed, and those released make it difficult to see how spending is bolstered for those serving in leadership positions.

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, for example, is listed as having member expenditures of $225,939, relatively low for the Assembly. But other portions of the multipage records list speaker’s office expenditures of $373,206 and spending for the Democratic Caucus, which Pérez leads, at $6.7 million.

Friday’s fiscal disclosures come less than a month after The Bee and Los Angeles Times filed suit against the Assembly after it balked at releasing current office records, citing an exemption in legislative public-records law for correspondence, notes, memoranda and preliminary drafts.

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