Hate paying $1 every 20 minutes for short-term parking at Salt Lake City International Airport? Rather battle crowds at curbside to pick up or drop off friends and relatives?

Don't like paying $19 a day to park in that short-term lot during trips? Settle for distant or off-airport satellite parking instead?

Not if you are a member of Congress (or some of their staff), or Salt Lake City Council members, or the mayor, or city department heads, or members of the airport board or a few other select individuals.

They have free parking privileges at the airport, including at its convenient (but expensive for others) short-term parking facility, according to a list obtained by the Deseret Morning News through a state open records law request.

The privilege extended to the privileged is good for both business or personal travel, although most (but not all) say they use it just for government trips. Any use of the privilege for personal travel is a perk that public officials should not have, says Anthony Musci, chairman of the watchdog group Common Cause of Utah.

"It's wrong, but it's not capital murder either. It does elevate public officials above the rest of the citizenry," Musci says. "On principle it is wrong, and I can't understand why any politician receives a perk like this for personal travel."

No one can remember exactly when that free parking perk began. "I've been here 17 years, and it has been here at least that long," says airport spokeswoman Barbara Gann.

"In the olden days, the list (of free-parking recipients) was longer. We used to have a dedicated lot for that, with more space," she said. But that early lot has since disappeared amid airport expansion, as have some of the sites chosen to replace it.

Peter Carr, press secretary to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says, "The airport used to have an area for public officials right between the two terminals, but after Sept. 11, 2001, the airport did not want personal cars right up next to the terminals and instead provided parking passes" to its other lots, gratis.

Gann said the decision to allow free parking (and to whom) is made by airport administrators, not the airport board or City Council. She said the current list of types of officials with that perk has not changed much in years.

At the top of the list is Utah's congressional delegation, who fly to Washington almost every week. Each of the five members said it was offered to them without requesting it. And they say they use it only when on official business, or at least none recalled using it for personal travel.