Conflicts of interests are found in many bills

More than half of Utah's 104 part-time legislators have introduced bills with likely conflicts of interests, a study by the Deseret News shows.

The newspaper found that 61 percent of House members and 55 percent of senators are sponsoring bills that could affect their private or business lives in some ways.

And those numbers could be higher. Some legislators, especially a number of state senators, either didn't fill out their conflict-of-interest update forms as rules require, or signed the forms but listed no conflicts of interests at all.

Speaking in a Friday meeting of the House Ethics Committee, Rep. Brad Last, R-St. George, said that legislators want to act on a number of bills this session to increase "transparency" — and to let the public know what is really going on in the Legislature and in legislative candidates' campaigns.

A conflict of interest is generally defined as a conflict between a person's private interests (financial or otherwise) and his or her public position.

But the Legislature's conflict-of-interest rules are so vague (and, at the same time, so narrow on financial matters) that legislators themselves, much less the public, often don't know exactly when they need to declare a conflict, or what to do about it when they do.

That has led to wide swings of interpretation.

Two years ago two House members claimed they had no official conflicts of interest — even though one ran a water company that could make $1 million a year selling water to a nuclear power plant for which the other was seeking to gain a permit. Both also were sitting on legislative committees dealing with energy development in the Utah.

Conflicts come with the job

Conflicts of interests are natural occurrences in a citizenry-based part-time legislature. Just last week The Salt Lake Tribune reported on a possible conflict of House Majority Leader Kevin Garn, R-Layton, over an ambulance license bill being advocated by his lobbyist son, Jordan.

Garn's conflict-of-interest form has a long list of possible conflicts for the lawmaker himself but does not mention that his son is a registered lobbyist. Several other legislators with close relatives working as lobbyists did make mention of those on their conflict forms. And Garn said he will amend his form to include his son's conflicts, even though he reads legislative rules to not require such a disclosure because his son doesn't live with him.