How tough need it be to contact legislator?

Access to Utah legislators by the public, lobbyists and the news media is the focus of another round of hearings set to begin today.

Depending on what the Legislative Process Committee recommends to members of the Utah House and Senate, talking to lawmakers when they're meeting on Capitol Hill might get easier, or it might become tougher.

In late 2007, a $200 million reconstruction of the Capitol will be completed, and the governor, attorney general, other state executives and the 104 part-time legislators will move back into the historic building in time for the 2008 45-day general session.

Decisions made now about public access to legislators will likely be carried forward into the Capitol, Capitol Preservation Board officials say.

Remodeling plans call for separate elevators for legislators along with private offices for each. Private hallways lead to and from the House and Senate chambers and from many, but not all, of the legislators' offices. Security will also be enhanced. All of which could lead to legislators spending more time away from the press and public, both during their annual 45-day general session and monthly interim meetings.

But the co-chairmen of the Legislative Process Committee — Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, and Rep. Ron Bigelow, R-West Valley — say they want more, not less, access to legislators, and thus the reason for today's hearing.

The latest discussions come after public and media access to legislators was restricted during the 2005 Legislature — which met for the first time in temporary, cramped offices and chambers located in an office building behind the now-closed Capitol — and after a special legislative task force on changing Utah's basic public records law, GRAMA, has started to meet.

Civil libertarians worry that GRAMA might be further restricted, denying various avenues to government documents by the public and media.

Restrictions on media access to legislators started several years ago when former-Senate President Al Mansell, R-Sandy, announced that news reporters could not walk around the Senate Chambers' outside aisles during debate. Also, Utah is one of two dozen states that had allowed news reporters to sit in designated areas on the sides of legislative chambers, separate from the public galleries.

Reporters had been able to walk around the outside aisle to speak to legislative leaders, an appreciated accommodation after telephones in the Senate were turned off to outside calls years earlier. Mansell also ordered that reporters couldn't walk back into the individual offices of senators, who had moved into the old Supreme Court offices, without first being cleared by secretaries.