Without Tetris on the county's side, Hatch said nobody is lobbying legislators to make sure the taxpayers' priorities are kept in mind during negotiations on how to spend the nearly $1.2 billion the county will collect in sales taxes for transportation over the next 30 years.

In the end, Hatch said Tetris quit because the firm was fed up with all the scrutiny.

"I think too many people in Salt Lake County government kept publicly using them as a whipping boy and beating them up in public for their own political partisan agenda," Hatch said. "I think they just said to heck with it, we don't have that big of a contract with Salt Lake County, and we're not interested in being in the newspaper every other day."

By quitting, Tetris avoided another possible conflict this year over representing the county on the question of restaurant taxes. The firm will likely represent Sandy, and Sandy Mayor Tom Dolan is leading the charge for cities to take the restaurant tax away from counties across the state.

If that happens, Salt Lake County would lose $15 million in tax revenue. That money is used to pay the debt service on the Salt Palace and South Towne Exposition Center bonds, as well as operating costs at those facilities and several county cultural centers, including Abravanel Hall and the Capitol Theatre, said Darrin Casper, the county's chief financial officer.

The county spent $160,000 on lobbyists last year, and Corroon's proposed budget cut that down to $155,000 for 2007. Suzuki-Okabe said the county is trying to slowly cut back the amount of dollars spent on lobbyists while it develops its own in-house lobbying strategy.

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E-mail: ldethman@desnews.com