Lawmakers lock up their records and toss key

As Mel Brooks says: "It's good to be king."

And following that truism, I've now come across another example of how the Utah Legislature takes care of ... the Utah Legislature.

While I have regularly used the state's open records law to GRAMA (yes, it has become a verb) information from the executive branch of state government, I recent went through this process for the legislative branch.

You have to love the nerve (or is arrogance a better word?) of these legislators taking care of their own "private" records.

Through the Government Records Access and Management Act process I asked for all of the cell telephone numbers for lawmakers' BlackBerrys, which the 104 lawmakers decided to buy for themselves with taxpayer dollars in 2005 at a cost of around $220,000. I also asked for those cell phone monthly records for the elected legislative leaders of both political parties, House and Senate.

I wanted all the cell phone numbers so I can call these guys quickly ... deadlines, deadlines.

I wanted to look at the cell phone records of leaders to see who they were calling frequently — might be interesting to know if a leader was calling certain lobbyists day in and day out.

But stupid me, I had forgotten that several years ago The Salt Lake Tribune had tried to get all the taxpayer-paid-for cell-phone numbers of our elected lawmakers. Lawmakers didn't like that. So the Legislature passed a law — that's right, a law! — that classified their own cell phone numbers as private under GRAMA. (Some lawmakers do list their cell phone numbers voluntarily, and a number have given me their numbers when I ask, which I appreciate.)

On the other request — leaders' cell phone monthly bills — the legislative attorneys also declined (no surprise to me). But the reasoning behind that decline is wonderful, classic Legislature.

The legislative attorneys said they couldn't give me the monthly bills because some of the calls on the BlackBerrys could be personal and private under GRAMA.

The Deseret News' attorney for GRAMA requests, Jeff Hunt, a former reporter here, says he can see some sense in that — what if a leader were calling his AA counselor or his psychiatrist. Such information probably shouldn't be public.

But then — and this is the part I really love — the legislative attorneys said they COULDN'T EVEN ASK the legislative leaders to say which telephone calls were personal and which were legislative related, and thus maybe public, because that IN ITSELF would be a violation of the GRAMA privacy regulations.

Talk about don't ask don't tell.