No end to lobbyists' 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.

Even though previous polls by Jones have also shown a desire for change in Utah's gift-taking regulations, legislators have refused to adopt alternatives, with the Senate killing such bills in recent years.

Although both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, Jones found that citizen members of both parties want change. Three-fourths of Democrats said lobbyist gifts should be banned or legislators who take any gift over $5 be named, while 61 percent of Republicans said the same thing.

Jones also asked about two other so-called government reform issues: Setting up an independent ethics commission to review complaints about officials in all three branches of government, and campaign contribution limits.

The survey found that 77 percent of Utahns strongly or somewhat favor setting up an independent ethics commission, before which everyday citizens could bring complaints about legislators, executive branch officials or even judges. Currently, there is no formal way to bring a complaint against an executive branch member; legislator ethical complaints can only be brought by fellow lawmakers before an in-house ethics committee; and complaints against judges go to a judicial review committee, where the complaints are kept secret unless official action is later taken against a judge.

Finally, Jones found that 58 percent of Utahns want some kind of limits placed on contributions to statewide or legislative candidates. One-third said the current system of unlimited contributions by citizens, political action committees or businesses is fine.

Plenty of cash