No room for free speech on Hill?

A new rule governing the exercise of free speech at the state Capitol complex may end up giving lobbyists access to lawmakers that the public won't have — at least while the Legislature is meeting in cramped temporary quarters.

"The question is going to come up," Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told fellow members of the Capitol Preservation Board before they voted this week to approve banning leafleting and other free-speech activities outside the temporary legislative chambers and committee rooms.

Shurtleff said the state can expect to be sued if lobbyists continue to hand out information to lawmakers in the chambers and committee room areas while other activities are relegated to the main entrance of the West Building, where the Legislature is meeting while the Capitol is being renovated.

"What's going to be challenged is how it's applied and how it's enforced," the attorney general said of the new rule. He said the board doesn't want to be "saying to other citizens and groups that maybe if they don't have lobbyists, they're going to be pushed" away.

Attorney Brian Barnard, who represented several groups that sued the state after running into trouble passing out leaflets during the 2006 Legislature, said he agrees. The lawsuits filed by his clients led to the new rule being drafted.

"Everybody needs to be treated equally," Barnard said. "If lobbyists can be in that area and lobbyists can hand something to a legislator in that area, then everybody else should be able to. . . . We've got discriminatory treatment and we've got unequal access in that forum."

But two board members, Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem, and House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, both said they feared such activities would be disruptive as long as lawmakers are meeting in their temporary quarters.

"It's not just the noise associated, but trying to move between committee rooms," Curtis said. "If it's just packed with people, that's going to disrupt the process." Lobbyists, he said, typically are not "standing out there leafleting."

Instead, lobbyists usually send notes in to individual House or Senate members while they are in session requesting a chance to make a pitch for particular legislation. That option is also available to members of the public.