It's Christmas all year for gift-loving legislators

Utah's 104 part-time legislators took a quarter million dollars in gifts last year from lobbyists and public colleges, lobbyist filings show.

Let me repeat that number — $250,000 in free meals, sporting event tickets, rounds of golf, concerts, even trips to Florida and Las Vegas.

While the gift-taking number may be larger than in recent years, the issue of legislative swag is not.

A new public opinion poll by Dan Jones & Associates for the newspaper and KSL-TV finds that nearly two-thirds of Utahns want either the gift-taking banned outright, or they want more disclosure of gifts tied to specific legislators.

The current law says a lobbyist only has to name the legislator who takes his gifts if the gift is more than $50 in one day. And only 40 percent of that $250,000 came with legislators' names attached. The rest of the spending was nameless.

Lobbyists, as a recent investigation by the Deseret Morning News shows, have become adept at providing gifts in ways that bypass naming legislators. And several conversations I've had with lobbyists after that story ran a week ago tell me that there are some lobbyists who just are not reporting some of their $50 or more gifts at all, either through sloppy record-keeping or planned underreporting.

It's clear, however, that legislators are just not going to do anything about gift-taking. It is not a partisan issue; the two highest gift-takers are members of Democratic leadership in the Senate. And most legislators are safe in re-election in their districts. More than 90 percent of legislators who seek re-election win.

At this point lobbyist gifts to legislators have become ingrained in the legislative branch of government. Some lawmakers expect them and clearly don't want to function without them.

Two examples of how bizarre this has become:

• The Utah Legislature belongs to several national legislative groups — one being the National Conference of State Legislatures. NCSL is a valuable organization, especially for a part-time legislature. NCSL has various conferences each year, but at its annual conference in the summer it is customary for each state to host a "state night dinner."

When the NCSL conference was in Nashville, Utah lawmakers and guests went on a Mississippi River cruise one night, with dinner and dancing.

Guess who pays for this "state night dinner"? Yep. Local lobbyists. And dozens of them go to NCSL just to be present at that event. But why are lobbyists paying for a conference dinner in the first place? If NCSL is important enough for the state to pay travel, hotel and registration fees for Utah lawmakers, why doesn't the state pay for the "state night dinner" as well?