Sources & Methodology

# How we built these numbers — and how to check them

Everything here is drawn from public disclosure records. Our standard is that anyone can trace each figure back to a primary filing, re-run the math, and reach the same result. This page is the receipt: the totals, the rules we used, what we excluded, and how to verify it yourself.

### En breve (Español)

Toda la información proviene de registros públicos de gobierno (contribuciones de campaña y cabildeo). Estos son hechos con su fuente, no acusaciones: contribuir y cabildear es legal y se divulga por ley. Mantenemos solo lo que pudimos confirmar y publicamos también lo que excluimos. Las guías comunitarias en lenguaje sencillo están disponibles en español.

## The principle

Contributions and lobbying are lawful, routine, and disclosed by design. A disclosed payment is a fact to note, never proof of influence, coordination, or a quid pro quo — and we never imply one. We publish the source alongside every claim, mark how confident we are, and — importantly — we publish what we left out. Hiding an inconvenient row would invite the very suspicion we're trying to dispel; showing our exclusions is how the work earns trust.

## Where the money is

Two headline figures, defined precisely so they can't be mistaken for each other:

$1,382,736
Attributable total — company + named principals, all jurisdictions, 2010–2026
$1,542,193
All-in, including the separate employee-aggregate lens (+$159,456)

### Company / entity money — $848,441

Component | Amount | Source
--- | --- | ---
Federal lobbying fees | $710,000 | U.S. Senate LDA (21 filings)
LA City lobbying fees | $107,500 | LA City Ethics (Veritas)
CA state organizational contributions | $30,941 | Cal-Access (Lineage Holdings, etc.)
Subtotal | $848,441 |

### Principals' personal political giving — $534,295

Jurisdiction | Amount | Detail
--- | --- | ---
Federal | $433,195 | Marchetti $308,712 · Forste $123,983 · Lehmkuhl $500 net
CA state | $98,000 | Marchetti $46,500 · Forste $51,500
LA City | $3,100 | Marchetti (Garcetti 2013, Bass 2026)
Subtotal | $534,295 |

The employee-aggregate lens ($159,456) — contributions by individuals who self-reported a Lineage employer — is reported separately and is not attributed to the company. Individual rank-and-file donors are kept as a pattern, not named.

## What we excluded — the discipline, made visible

Searching public databases by name surfaces a large crowd of look-alikes. The hard part of honest data work is throwing most of it away. We kept only rows we could confirm, and quarantined the rest — retained on disk, tagged, and contributing $0 to every total above.

~$1.38M
Kept — confirmed company / principal money
~$10.2M
Excluded as namesakes / different people (≈42,700 rows)

We excluded roughly seven times more than we kept. The largest excluded group is the “Forster” clan (Juan Y. Forster, Katherine Forster, Egerton Forster, and dozens more) — a different surname from Bay Grove's Forste. Also excluded:

- Lineage Cell Therapeutics (a biotechnology company) and Lineage Real Estate — unrelated entities that share the word “Lineage.”
- Walter G. Lehmkuhl — a Con-Way executive who shares CEO Greg Lehmkuhl's surname and former employer but is a different person (different first name).
- Alexandria, Lauren, and Louis Marchetti — different individuals (different first names; one lists “not employed,” another lists an unrelated employer).

Source | false_match | different | review (held out)
--- | --- | --- | ---
FEC bulk | $9,355,528 | $527,262 | $3,225
Cal-Access | $173,948 | $117,326 | $32,708

## How we decide a “match”

Two records sharing a surname is not a match. We confirm identity with corroborating fields:

- Employer is the disambiguator. A contribution counts toward a principal only when the filing's employer field ties to the company (e.g., “Bay Grove,” “Lineage Logistics”) — the FEC and federal data carry this field; where a source lacks it (LA City contributions), we rely on exact name + city.
- First name required. Principal matches require the person's first name — Kevin Marchetti, Adam Forste, Greg / Gregory Lehmkuhl — not just the surname plus an employer, which is what swept in the namesakes we later excluded.
- Controlled entity list. Lineage Logistics / Solutions / Holdings, Bay Grove, Preferred Freezer, the named principals, and the two lobbying firms (Veritas, M Strategic).

## De-duplication

Federal contributions exist in two of our sources — a processed seed (which includes ActBlue conduit gifts) and the raw FEC bulk files (which do not). To avoid both double-counting and under-counting, we treat the seed as the complete base and add only genuinely new bulk rows, de-duplicated by transaction identity. The result reconciles to a single figure per person (e.g., Kevin Marchetti = $308,712), with no row counted twice.

## Confidence tags

Every row carries one of:

match identity confirmed different / review likely a different person, or not yet verified — excluded from totals false_match shares a search string but is a different person/entity — excluded aggregate employee self-reported employer — reported as a pattern, not by name

## Primary sources

- U.S. Senate LDA — federal lobbying registrations & quarterly activity. lda.senate.gov
- FEC — federal contributions, committees, bulk individual files. fec.gov
- LA City Ethics Commission — city lobbying registrations, payments, campaign contributions, behested payments. ethics.lacity.gov
- Cal-Access (CA Secretary of State) — state contributions & lobbying. powersearch.sos.ca.gov · cal-access bulk export
- EPA RMP / EPCRA — facility hazardous-materials reporting (the ~12,300 lb ammonia figure).

## Verify it yourself

The full dataset is published as a spreadsheet (one tab per source plus a normalized “all money flows” tab), a queryable database, and the underlying filing PDFs, alongside a written reconciliation. To check any figure: open the row, follow its source link to the original filing, and confirm the contributor, employer, amount, and date. To check a total, filter the “all money flows” tab by confidence = match and sum. Excluded rows are present too, so you can audit what we left out.

Compiled June 25, 2026 from primary public records. Contributions and lobbying are lawful and disclosed by design; these are facts with confidence tags, not allegations of influence or wrongdoing, and no quid pro quo is implied. Rank-and-file individuals are reported in aggregate to protect personal privacy. This page is for public transparency and is not legal advice. Figures are reconciled to the dataset; where a live source updates, the dataset is refreshed and this page follows.