Legislative conferences really worthwhile

More than 4,000 legislators from around the country are in Salt Lake City this week attending the annual convention of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Unfortunately, attendance is down from recent conventions. A longtime Maine legislator who has attended the conference for years and seen attendance rise and fall, often by how "fun" the host city is, said reporters and other legislative critics probably won't "raise an eyebrow" when tax dollars are spent on convention travel to a place like Salt Lake.

I mean, you gotta be on state business here, right? What else would you do?

I've been over at the Salt Palace each day, attending one, two or three sessions a day, and by and large it looks like a pretty successful convention.

"It's a working convention," says Utah House Speaker Marty Stephens, who is president of NCSL this year.

And maybe that's true.

The Maine legislator, John Martin, was — unfortunately for him — president of NCSL the year the convention was held in Orlando. And he spent most of each day talking to reporters, trying to explain, defend or shake his head over a number of legislators who went but attended no or few meetings.

"There were (TV and print) pictures of legislators getting off a fishing boat" after a day of fishing — and not attending NCSL meetings — holding up their prize catches, pictures of legislators playing golf and walking around Disney World with big Mickey Mouse ears on, Martin recalls.

In a way, NCSL and the naughty legislators got what they deserved that year, he said.

And while NCSL has gone to San Francisco and Las Vegas since, they haven't gone back to Orlando.

But Salt Lake. Now, there's a city that if you come for a week in July probably nobody back home is going to complain.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lucy Martin, who has covered Florida politics since 1968 and now works for the St. Petersburg Times, says cutbacks in newspaper revenues means many newspapers don't have the budgets to send reporters to NCSL conventions, anyway. So you probably won't get the bad press if you come.

Utah hosts hoped 6,000 legislators would turn up the week. Unfortunately, only 4,000 did, one of the lower turn-outs in recent years.

"It's pretty quiet in this town, isn't it?" one NCSL attendee remarked to me on Monday afternoon, as we walked down the street and the temperature climbed over 95.