The new legislative office, however, has private elevators for lawmakers. They can come from secure underground parking, up to their chambers and up to their fourth floor staff offices without having to meet the public.

In addition, reporters were moved off of the House and Senate chamber floors in the new building. They will now sit behind thick glass in small public galleries, viewing legislators' actions. And reporters also can't walk out on the floors while the Legislature is in session. They couldn't do that in the Senate before the move, but the House adopted the same rule last session.

In short, partly under the guise of security, partly under the desire to be less available to the media and public, Utah's 104 part-time legislators are setting themselves more apart.

This, clearly, is not a good thing.

Part of the irony of the post-9/11 security argument — at least as the new legislative offices are concerned — is that the conservative Legislature won't do perhaps the easiest thing to increase security: Put in metal detectors and don't let people carry guns or knives into the office building.

Congress, the courts and other public places do this. I visited London and Paris this summer, and all the major museums and public buildings there use metal detectors.

The conservative GOP majority in the Utah Legislature won't do this, of course, because gun-rights advocates would likely be angry. As now-U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop (then a gun-rights lobbyist) assessed at the end of one recent legislative session: "We won everything" in the gun-control debate. Not much has changed since.

Certainly, the powerful citizen gun lobby wouldn't like the no-carry restrictions unless gun lockers were placed at the doors so they could put their pistols in the lockers, retrieving them when they left. (You do remember the 2002 brouhaha among GOP leaders when legally permitted concealed weapons owners protested against Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to a state GOP convention and they couldn't carry their guns into the arena.)

So instead of restricting dangerous weapons in the new office building, designers restricted access to legislators via private elevators, parking and hallways.

No one wants a public safety incident. And legislators do want to do their work in the public eye, with the public's support.

But through structural changes in the new building and operational decisions by legislators themselves, the public come the 2005 Legislature will not have the availability to lawmakers that they have had before.

And both sides will be the poorer for it.

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Deseret Morning News political editor Bob Bernick Jr. may be reached by e-mail at bbjr@desnews.com