Another legislative session in Utah brings another needed call for better ethics. Utah legislators have made tiny, baby steps toward ethics reform within the past couple of years, but they still fall short.
The most notable practice by the Legislature is its failure to enact campaign finance limits. A legislator can gobble up all the campaign cash he or she desires from special interests.
Also, legislators are allowed to use some of their campaign funds for personal stuff, or as gifts to other legislators.
This is not what the public thought they were getting when legislators told us they had "accomplished" ethics reforms.
A recent media analysis of how some campaign cash was spent shows a lot of expenditures that simply do not pass an ethical smell test. For example, Rep. Jack Draxler, R-North Logan, spent $500 of campaign cash for a condominium in Salt Lake City. Greg Curtis, the former Utah House Speaker that is now a lobbyist gave more than $31,000 of his leftover campaign cash to other legislators. In other words, pols who are probably talking to a lobbyist received $31,000-plus from that lobbyist. That's simply not ethical.
Another expenditure that seems ridiculous is former legislative candidate, Val Bateman, who after losing his bid donated $1,714 of leftover campaign cash to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There's a whole slurry of inappropriate use of campaign cash that is legal, thanks to Utah's toothless ethics laws. In fact, more than $60,000 was used by pols to pay back loans they had made to their own campaigns.
These are not close ethical calls. Everyone knows that such uses for money -- intended to be spent on a campaign -- is unethical. But, because the dominant party in Utah's Legislature allows this kind of stuff to happen year after year, it continues. When the public tries to have a voice via an initiative, the same party enacts extremely onerous signature requirements and uses its influence at the state's executive office to enable its requirements.
To stop this good-old-boy ethics requires Utahns to stand up and demand change. Inaction and apathy only help the lax ethics laws survive.
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