Local elections have traditionally placed considerable weight on résumés. Professional titles, years of public service, community connections, endorsements, and institutional experience all give voters information about the people asking to represent them.
But Ontario’s 2026 City Council District 3 race is also raising another question: What can candidates demonstrate before Election Day?
For D’Andre Lampkin, a qualified candidate for Ontario City Council District 3, that question has become an important part of his campaign. Lampkin has emphasized public safety, responsible growth, infrastructure, neighborhood engagement and transparency since entering the race. More recently, his campaign has moved beyond discussing transparency as a policy objective and developed a tool intended to put that idea into practice.
On September 14, the Lampkin campaign launched the Ontario Development Transparency Dashboard, a searchable collection of public planning and development records compiled from government sources. The project offers a concrete example of the approach Lampkin says he wants to bring to local government: making existing public information easier for residents to find, understand and independently verify.
Transparency Takes on New Significance in Ontario
The dashboard arrives during an unusual period for Ontario politics. On July 28, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home of Ontario Mayor Pro Tem Alan Wapner. Federal agents also conducted searches at other locations, and reporting has connected the federal activity to the Ontario International Airport Authority. The warrants remain sealed, and federal officials have not publicly disclosed the full scope of the investigation. No criminal charges against Wapner have been announced in connection with the searches.
The searches quickly generated public discussion about transparency and accountability. Residents attended an August City Council meeting seeking additional information, while city officials debated Wapner’s continued participation in regional boards and other assignments. That broader environment has placed additional attention on how Ontario’s government operates and how easily residents can access information about public decisions. Development is particularly relevant to that discussion. As neighborhoods grow, residents may want to understand what is being proposed near their homes, which public body has authority over a project, whether a proposal has been approved, and where the underlying government records can be found. Lampkin’s answer has been to build a centralized resource around those questions.
Turning Public Records Into a Usable Tool
The Ontario Development Transparency Dashboard currently contains 62 verified planning records drawn from official sources, with the primary dataset covering records reviewed through June 2026 as well as select earlier actions. The campaign describes the project as an evolving dataset rather than a complete historical inventory of development throughout Ontario. Residents can filter records by categories including project type, status, council district, city file year, development topic, and the government body responsible for a decision. Individual entries are intended to connect users with the underlying public records whenever those sources are available.
The campaign also publishes its methodology and acknowledges gaps in the data. Of the 62 records currently published, 47 have verified council-district assignments, while 15 remain classified as “District Not Yet Verified” because their district placement requires additional verification. The dashboard says records are checked against official City of Ontario documents and that only records meeting its publication standard contribute to its public statistics.
It also makes an important distinction: the dashboard is a campaign-created public-records tool, not an official City of Ontario website, and the city has not endorsed it.
That distinction matters. The project does not replace city records or the work of Ontario’s Planning Division. Instead, its stated purpose is to reorganize publicly available information into a format residents may find easier to explore.
A Different Way to Demonstrate a Campaign Priority
Transparency is not unique to Lampkin’s campaign. Michael Rios, another District 3 candidate, identifies transparency and accountability as central themes of his candidacy. Rios is a software engineer who says he created Citizens4Ontario approximately two years ago to provide residents with information about city budgets and priorities. His campaign also offers a Budget Explorer and emphasizes making government information more accessible.
The candidates therefore bring different experiences and approaches to overlapping questions about public information and accountability. What distinguishes Lampkin’s latest effort is the decision to create a development-specific resource while the campaign is underway. Rather than treating government transparency exclusively as something to pursue after taking office, the dashboard gives residents an opportunity to examine one version of Lampkin’s proposed approach now. Residents can use the resource, follow its source links, and evaluate its usefulness themselves.
Lampkin describes the project in similar terms. According to the dashboard, he believes transparency should involve making public information understandable and searchable rather than simply making documents technically available. The campaign says the dashboard is intended as an example of the type of accessible public information Lampkin would seek to advance if elected.
Bringing Several Areas of Experience Together
The project also connects several parts of D’Andre Lampkin’s professional and civic background. Lampkin currently serves on the Ontario Planning Commission. He is also a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff, a California POST-certified academy instructor, nonprofit founder, healthcare entrepreneur, and emergency-management professional, according to his campaign biography. Those roles intersect with several issues facing a rapidly developing city.
Planning involves understanding land use, development applications, and the public process surrounding growth. Emergency management depends heavily on organizing information, identifying risks, and making complex information usable during decision-making. Law enforcement and public safety provide another perspective on infrastructure, neighborhood conditions and community preparedness. Outside government, Lampkin founded the D’Andre D. Lampkin Foundation, whose work has focused on areas including community resilience, disaster response, food security, education and civic engagement.
His campaign has attempted to connect those different experiences through direct neighborhood engagement as well. Since qualifying for the District 3 ballot, Lampkin has participated in neighborhood walks and conversations with residents about traffic, speeding, infrastructure, development, public safety, city services and other quality-of-life concerns. The transparency dashboard adds another component to that model: giving residents access to information they can investigate themselves.
From Campaign Promises to Demonstrable Projects
The larger idea behind Lampkin’s approach has relevance beyond any one campaign. Candidates routinely tell voters what they intend to do after taking office. Campaigns publish policy platforms, attend community events, participate in forums, and explain how a candidate’s professional experience could translate into public leadership. Digital tools create another possibility. A campaign can use the period before an election to demonstrate how one of its priorities might work in practice.
That does not make a campaign-created dashboard equivalent to governing. Elected officials operate within legal, budgetary, and institutional constraints that political campaigns do not face. Likewise, a campaign’s public-records project should be evaluated on its accuracy, completeness, methodology and continued maintenance. Lampkin’s dashboard openly acknowledges some of those limitations. It describes itself as a growing dataset, identifies records that still require verification, and directs users back to government documents so they can check the underlying information. That source-first approach may be particularly relevant at a moment when transparency has become a prominent subject in Ontario civic life.
A District 3 Race Focused on What Comes Next
D’Andre Lampkin officially qualified for the District 3 ballot in July after submitting his nomination paperwork. His campaign says its priorities include neighborhood engagement, responsible growth, infrastructure, public safety, and responsive local government. The Ontario Development Transparency Dashboard now provides residents with something more concrete to examine alongside those campaign commitments. It also reflects a broader change in how political candidates can present their qualifications. Experience and professional credentials remain part of the information voters consider, but technology makes it increasingly possible for candidates to supplement a résumé with projects residents can see and evaluate for themselves.
For Lampkin, the dashboard represents an effort to do exactly that. Instead of asking residents simply to accept a promise of greater transparency, his campaign has created a public tool intended to show what greater access to development information could look like. Ultimately, District 3 voters will decide how much weight to give that project alongside the candidates’ records, policy positions, professional backgrounds and competing visions for Ontario. But as the campaign moves toward November, the dashboard adds something tangible to that conversation: a working example residents can examine long before any ballots are counted.
