Ethics panel may run $500K

Leaders of a citizen initiative petition on ethics in the Utah Legislature will likely accept the state's cost estimate for setting up an independent ethics commission even though it's higher than their own.

The state figures it will cost about $500,000 a year, while Utahns for Ethical Governments pegs it at $472,000 annually to run an independent commission. In the initiative, the Legislature is ordered to appropriate at least that much each year for the commission's work.

"I don't think we'll quibble about the cost difference," Kim Burningham said Wednesday. "Let's go" and get the required 95,000 signatures, he added.

Burningham, a former GOP House member and current member of the State School Board, is chairman of Utahns for Ethical Government, the group that is running the initiative.

If the needed signatures of registered voters can be gathered — and gathered in the required areas of the state — then the initiative will be on the November 2010 ballot for voter approval or rejection.

John Nixon, head of the governor's budget office, in his official financial estimate says it will cost $536,000 the first year of the new ethics law.

That number includes $36,000 to print the initiative information in the Voter's Information Pamphlet that the lieutenant governor's office puts out for each general election, he said.

And each year after that initial cost, the new commission and its activities will cost $500,000, Nixon said.

The half-million dollars breaks out as $400,000 to hire staff and conduct ethics investigations as need be, and $100,000 for the Legislature's own attorney's office to pay "reasonable" outside attorney fees for legislators accused of wrongdoing. Nixon points out in his cost estimate that the $100,000 figure is very iffy.

"It is unknown how many complaints will be filed and the cost of legal counsel," Nixon's letter to UEG says. (The act itself prohibits the Legislature's own attorneys from representing an accused legislator.)

Nixon said, "This act provides 'any such legislator who desires to retain counsel may select any attorney or law firm. The reasonable fees of any such law firm, including other costs of such representation, shall be paid out of funds allocated to the office of Legislative Research and General Counsel, and this payment shall be made whether or not the legislator is acquitted of the charges of misconduct.'"