By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, December 2010
In late December 2010, FishbowlLA covered a local-government transparency fight in Burbank. The city had disclosed that — amid budget shortfalls — Burbank city employees had received roughly $1 million in bonuses the prior year. But the city would not say who got the bonuses or why. Burbank Leader columnist Dan Evans pushed for the details.
Then
The December 2010 Burbank story was a small-scale municipal transparency dispute. Dan Evans, a Burbank Leader columnist, was pursuing the disclosure — a local journalist doing the basic public-records work of holding a city government accountable. Juli Scott, Burbank’s chief assistant city attorney, was the institutional gatekeeper resisting it.
The “Burbank Needs Some Wikileaks” headline placed the local story in the broader 2010 WikiLeaks news cycle. Tina Dupuy’s framing used the reference to make a serious point about the unglamorous version of the same accountability function.
Now
The Bell salary scandal — the LA Times’s July 2010 reporting on outrageous city-official salaries in Bell — had broken months before, and the post-Bell period produced substantial new California requirements around public-salary disclosure.
The Burbank Leader, like much of the broader Southern California community-newspaper landscape, has faced substantial contraction across the years since 2010.
The 2010 piece reads now as a small documented moment of local-government accountability journalism — and the broader concern it pointed at, the erosion of local journalism capacity, has substantially deepened.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.