'Message' bills likely this session

SALT LAKE CITY — If it's January, the skies are gray, there are air inversions along the Wasatch Front and it's cold and gloomy, it means the Utah Legislature can't be far away.

This year's 45-day session, which starts in about two weeks, will clearly be dominated by state budget concerns — how do legislators and Gov. Gary Herbert close an estimated $700 million budget gap?

But 2010 is also an election year for Herbert, all 75 House members and half of the 29-member Senate.

So politics will play a role as well. How will lawmakers, for example, deal with ethics, abortion, gun rights and gay rights?

Election year Legislatures usually bring so-called "message" bills — legislation designed to make either Democrats or Republicans take public votes on measures that later may be used against incumbents in their re-elections.

House Speaker Dave Clark, R-Santa Clara, says he's already seeing some of those.

"We have abortion, Common Ground (gay rights) and gun bills filed," said Clark, a southern Utah banker.

GOP leaders want to specifically deal with a package of so-called "government reform" bills early in the session. Get them passed and out of the way, in part so lawmakers can deal with heavy stuff like the budget, and in part to get media coverage of legislative ethics behind them.

"I for one would like to deal in the House with the (ethics) bills the first week," said Clark, who added that a number of lawmakers from both parties have been pushing such reforms for several years.

House Minority Leader David Litvack, D-Salt Lake, said he hopes that a public school sex education bill sponsored by a Democratic House member and GOP senator is not viewed as a message bill, although certainly that subject has been politicized in the past.

"One positive change" in recent legislative sessions is that critical financial problems have dominated, giving less time and interest to message bills. "But we'll still see them again" in the 2010 Legislature.

"Every election year (the Republicans) run abortion bills, you can count on it," Litvack said.

Sometimes those messages come in the form of a resolution, like one several years ago that asked Congress to get the United States out of the United Nations. It was rather quickly killed.

Others actually change state law, sometimes in a relatively minor way, sometimes major policy changes, but all drawing emotional debate.