State should pay for Legislature's tours

Next Wednesday, the 104-member Utah Legislature will take a daylong tour of Salt Lake County.

The 15-hour tour will cost about $100,000 and be paid for by local businesses, perhaps a few lobbyists, and Salt Lake County government.

When the cost of the tour became public at a Salt Lake County Council meeting this week — where council members were asked to make a $25,000 donation to the tour — the reaction generally was "$100,000 for a daylong trip!?"

And outside of the cost of the tour, picked up mostly by private entities, legislators will be paid their daily salary of $120 and their per diem of $39, while lawmakers located off of the Wasatch Front will also get a hotel room. All of that will be paid by the state.

With the ever-growing cost of hosting the Legislature when members travel to different parts of the state each August, it's clear the time has come for those hosting costs to be paid by the state not by local businesses and/or lobbyists.

Legislative leaders profess ignorance about the cost of the Salt Lake County tour (by the way, lawmakers will also visit Davis County for a day next week, but officials there say they are spending only about $12,000 on that tour).

House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, wondered aloud how anyone could even spend $100,000 on lawmakers in just one day's tour.

"That's almost $1,000 per legislator," Curtis exclaimed.

Hosts of the Salt Lake County event point to escalating costs in renting private-line buses that have video equipment (so lawmakers can watch a $25,000 video message produced especially for the tour), meals and written materials that will be given to legislators.

Those who donated to the Salt Lake County tour will be invited to spend some time with legislators — either on the tour itself or at a Wednesday night dinner.

And lawmakers themselves decided not to hold public hearings in the hosting counties on this trip, a change from when at least two, and sometimes more, public hearings were held as part of the Legislature's visit.

Combine the fund raising with no public hearings, and there is clearly a "pay to play" element of this year's legislative tour. And that casts a pall over the event.

I've covered most of the Legislature's statewide tours since they first started in the early 1990s.

And I've found them worthwhile, often very informative. Lawmakers and those traveling with them learned the troubles and challenges of Utahns living off of the Wasatch Front, and the tours were also a great way to learn about parts of Utah I, and I believe most of the legislators, had never seen before.