2010 Legislature to be remembered for budget, ethics

The 2010 Utah Legislature is over.

No one died. And especially for an election-year general session, there wasn't much blood spilled — political or otherwise.

In fact, this was one of the most pleasant sessions I've covered in more than 30 years spending much of January, February and early March in our beautiful state Capitol.

What will the 2010 session be known for?

Two things, I think:

Lawmakers dealt with a $700 million budget gap in a responsible manner, raising only the cigarette tax.

And they adopted a dozen or so government/ethics reforms measures — changes that quite frankly I never thought I would live to see.

In 1990, I wrote a series of articles titled "Paying for Power." The series detailed how lax Utah's campaign and ethics laws were at that time.

The state didn't even have any lobbyist financial disclosure — no one knew how much legislators, either individually or as a whole, were taking from lobbyists.

Few people paid any attention to the campaign finance reports legislators filed — and they only filed the reports (if you can believe it) AFTER the November election.

Those were paper filings, and so you had to make photocopies of all 104 lawmakers' reports and tally up the donations by hand to get a total, or to see who was giving how much money to various lawmakers.

Lawmakers' conflict of interest disclosures were vague, and some legislators didn't even bother to file them — there was no penalty.

One state senator was actually a paid "government consultant" to BOTH sides of a trucking deregulation fight — and no one knew about it.

In short, few Utahns (except for the now-defunct Utah Common Cause chapter) knew or cared about ethics in the Utah Legislature.

Well, it has taken nearly 20 years, but with a new breed of lawmakers, combined with two citizen initiative petitions this year, we get real, substantive change in how Utah lawmakers/lobbyists/big-money donors do business.

And I think the changes adopted by the 2010 Legislature — perhaps enhanced by citizen initiatives approved by voters this fall — will be a hallmark of the session that ended Thursday night.

It is perhaps a bit ironic when one looks at two of the men who did a great deal to get ethics bills drafted and passed this session.

Former Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack didn't get to cast one vote in favor of these bills. Killpack resigned his seat just before the 2010 Legislature convened Jan. 29, after being arrested in a DUI case.

But without Killpack's work on ethics bills over the last two years, the Senate may not have gone along with many of the changes this session.