No end to lobbyists' gifts?

Deseret Morning News graphic    Lobbyist gifts -- 2007 report (581 KB .pdf file)

Utah lobbyists gave state legislators and executives nearly $280,000 last year through all kinds of gifts — from Utah Jazz tickets to college sports tickets, Billy Joel and Jon Bon Jovi concerts, nights at the symphony, golf, travel to Florida and even American Express gift cards, an analysis by the Deseret Morning News shows.

Legislators alone took a quarter-million dollars in gifts, the newspaper found among the hundreds of pages of the 2007 year-end lobbyists financial reports.

Meanwhile, a new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Utahns want the gift-taking changed, either banned outright or want nearly all gifts identified with the legislator who took them. But legislators have rejected those changes year after year.

Utah's part-time legislators on average accepted $2,400 each in lobbyist gifts, which is about a fifth of their salary for the annual general session, the newspaper analysis found. Some legislators accept few gifts, while others collected several thousand dollars worth.

But who received exactly what and how much is often a mystery. Loopholes in Utah law allow lobbyists not to disclose on whom they spent about 60 percent of their gift money. Also, loopholes could allow many other gifts not to be disclosed at all.

Key findings of the analysis include:

• Even though Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signed an executive order banning state executives from taking lobbyist gifts, executives still took about $20,000 worth last year. Even Huntsman accepted some. And Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert — whose job it is to oversee lobbyists' registration and financial reporting — took $179 in gifts.

• While some lobbyists use loopholes to avoid disclosing who receives their gifts, a leading lobbyist, Micron's Stan Lockhart, who is also the Utah Republican Party chairman, may have found some new ways around reporting names of legislators who attended Jazz games in his firm's EnergySolutions Jazz suite. Lockhart declined comment on the newspaper's analysis.

• Key legislators have started taking expensive trips paid for by lobbyists, actions rarely seen in past years.

Disclosure or bans?

Pollster Dan Jones & Associates found in a new poll for the newspaper and KSL-TV that 38 percent of Utahns want to ban all gifts to legislators. Twenty-six percent want to lower the $50 legislator-naming level to $5, so nearly all gifts would be reported along with the lawmakers who took them.

Together, that's 64 percent who want some kind of tightening of the current gift-taking rules, Jones found. Twenty-nine percent said the current lobbyist reporting system is adequate.