UEG takes its ethics reform proposals to legislative interim committee

SALT LAKE CITY — Kim Burningham has opened up a second battlefront in his crusade to infuse ethics reform into Utah politics.

Burningham, chairman of Utahns for Ethical Government, presented suggestions Wednesday to the Ethics Interim Committee, composed of representatives from both houses of the state Legislature. The suggestions amounted to a scaled-down version of the ethics reform petition UEG has been trying to turn into a ballot initiative.

"They're basically the main items that we have presented in our initiative petition," Burningham said. "We have tried to make it simpler so they can see those ideas very, very quickly. We have not included items on certain subjects that did not seem to be within the jurisdiction of this committee."

The committee, chaired by Sen. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, and Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, expressed gratitude Wednesday for UEG's suggestions but did not commit to a timeline for acting upon them.

UEG's campaign to apply greater specificity to ethical standards for Utah elected officials has, to date, consisted of an unsuccessful attempt to acquire sufficient citizen signatures to make an ethics reform petition into a ballot initiative for the 2010 general election.

UEG is still compiling signatures, though, under the belief that its petition has until mid-August to obtain enough signatures to qualify for a spot on the ballot in 2012. The state does not agree that the window is still open for UEG's petition to hit the requisite signature threshold.

Wednesday's presentation to the Ethics Interim Committee doesn't mean that efforts to get ethics reform onto the ballot are over, UEG attorney David Irvine said.

"While we are confident we will be successful in getting on the ballot," Irvine said, "we can't make a guarantee of that, nor can we make a guarantee that once on the ballot voters will adopt the initiative. … But we … felt that it was important to be part of the dialogue going forward and engage the legislators on these issues. We appreciate the invitation they sent for us to be part of the discussion today."

Also Wednesday, UEG said in a press release that it had delivered a letter to Lt. Gov. Greg Bell, asking his office to reverse its directive to county clerks that they should refuse to accept e-signatures submitted by UEG to qualify its ethics initiative for the ballot placement.

UEG had collected approximately 10,000 e-signatures as of April 15, the release said, and the organization will renew its online signature collection in light of Tuesday's Utah Supreme Court ruling in the case of gubernatorial hopeful Farley Anderson.