Results in State School Board District 13 and double-disenfranchisement shenanigans?

First, I was wrong in my prediction that vote totals for State School Board District 13 would be significantly lower than the 2004 election. The unofficial results (pg. 3, lefthand column) show just a few hundred fewer votes than the race in 2004. Kyle Bateman defeated C. Mark Openshaw with 17,509 votes. I hope the almost 300 votes not for either candidate on the ballot were mostly write-ins for A. LeGrand Richards, the highly-qualified BYU professor excluded from the ballot.

However, my frustration with the apathy and lack of communication demonstrated by Bateman and Openshaw, as well as the entire school board candidate selection process, has been confirmed by subsequent events. In a minor, but indicative Election Night note of the silly process that allowed seven businessmen not living in District 13 to choose our candidates, Openshaw confirmed my suspicions that the candidates represented the same viewpoints: "I know Kyle well," he said. "I like him. We agree on many things, and so I give him my full support." And in keeping with the theme of his successful campaign, it appears that Bateman was the only victorious candidate in Utah County who did not return the Daily Herald's phone call after winning election on November 4th.

But the Tribune yesterday revealed that the situation has become even more sneaky and non-representative.

Bateman said he has two homes -- one in his district in Provo and one that his company bought as an investment outside his district in Mapleton. He said he intended to live in the Mapleton home for a time and sell it eventually while keeping the Provo home as his primary residence.

In his letter, however, he said he sought private counsel, who recently told him the law "would not likely support" that arrangement.

So he was going to move out of the district he was elected to represent to "eventually" return to his "primary residence" as soon as he was able to profitably flip that investment home in today's market, and he honestly thought that was no problem? I personally have trouble giving credence to the assertions that Bateman: A. sincerely believed that his living arrangement would meet state requirements and B. that this belief was "recently" disabused by private counsel so he could conveniently withdraw on the last possible day. If he cared about serving, why couldn't Bateman stay in his Provo home that is ostensibly his primary residence? He is apparently financially secure enough to own two houses, so living in the Mapleton house is a personal preference rather than a necessity in order to sell it. I also have trouble believing that Openshaw did not know this was coming.

So voters in my district were subjected to a political farce on two levels. First, they were arbitrarily denied the opportunity to have the most qualified candidate, A. LeGrand Richards, on the ballot, and second, the two candidates chosen to be on the ballot refused to campaign...literally. Neither Bateman nor Openshaw spent one penny on their campaign beyond the $15 filing fee. They didn't return phone calls and emails from organizations asking their positions and even voters in their district.

They expect us to believe that they somehow knew, independently, that they wouldn't need to spend any money or even respond to questions to win an open State School Board seat? They just assumed the other guy wouldn't campaign either in a year when increased scrutiny has been paid the board because of the voucher dispute and the faulty selection process? They "would love to have served," but put forth no effort to campaign in a district where the winner in 2004, Tom Gregory, spent $300 dollars of his own money to buy signs? The district was important enough to local politicians in 2004 that the defeated candidate, Brian Woodfield, raised over $1000 for flyers and signs from Becky Lockhart, Curtis Bramble, and Micron (i.e. Stan Lockhart), and the voters are supposed to believe that those political interests just went away? Bateman has close associations with PCE through his position on the Children First Utah advisory board, and they didn't donate money to a candidate in need? (I don't know if the PIC Development that Bateman was chair of is this PIC Development based in Orem Utah, but the lack of specifics and "Board of Sages" sound vaguely Koerberian. And Bateman's house flipping "investment" that is more important than the election he just won seems vaguely similar to "equity milling"... I bring that up because PIC Development is still the job listed on the CFU website and he is now president of Action Target, Inc. (I think that's him in the middle of the top picture) and holder of several shooting equipment related patents...which then makes absolutely no sense as to why he would be forced to live in the Mapleton house "his company bought as an investment.")

So a lot of things don't add up here. Why would two apparently competent and successful businessmen, both in high CEO/President positions, run apathetic, careless campaigns that actually alienated any of their constituents that did any research? How could they not post one sign, deliver one flyer, walk one neighborhood, or even answer an email inquiry? They could not have become successful in business if this was their normal persona. (Openshaw's company actually specializes in facilitating communication!) How could they have honestly thought they had a chance to win the election with such a campaign if they didn't know that their "opponent" was going to do the same thing?

Furthermore, why would Bateman's shooting supply company even be involved in real estate flipping and why would that force Bateman to move to Mapleton? How long has Bateman known he would be moving? Why did Bateman continue running at that point? He is the president of the company and just won election to state office--does anyone believe he could not stay in Provo if serving on the school board were important to him? How big and how nice is the "company" house in Mapleton that the company president is going to live in "for a time" that Bateman values the move more than the public service he ostensibly sought? Why wait until the last day of vote certification to make that decision public? Why move your family at all if you're just going to sell the house anytime in the near future?

I don't believe either Bateman or Openshaw is that clueless. I think the circumstances point to exactly what current State School Board Member, Kim Burningham, and excluded candidate, A. LeGrand Richards decried in the Tribune article...a willful collusion to ensure neither candidate had to face Richards on the ballot. The initial faulty process gave us two candidates with similar views, eliminating a choice for the district's voters. Bateman planned to move to Mapleton, whether before or after he signed his oath that he met residency requirements upon filing for candidacy on March 17th, I don't know. (Though I think that ownership of a home in Mapleton by either Action Target or Kyle Bateman and the date purchased would be part of public tax records...) Bateman knew that the next highest choice of the selection committee, A. LeGrand Richards, who differs philosophically from Bateman and Openshaw, would be put on the ballot if he dropped out--this was confirmed as the public education choice in District 11, Ralph Haws, who also finished third in committee rankings behind two voucher supporters, almost replaced Ted Heap on the ballot over a finance reporting mix-up. There was contact between Bateman and Openshaw in order to communicate the plan, i.e. that Bateman would remain on the ballot and that neither needed to waste any time or money campaigning since the result was a foregone conclusion.

This is admittedly conjecture, but I don't know how else you can spin the actions of these two intelligent men. I would love to hear their explanation for their non-campaigns, their non-responsiveness, and how much they honestly communicated before, during, and after the election. I don't think a run-off election would be allowed or cost efficient, but a run-off between Openshaw and Richards would be the best way to allow District 13 voters a real choice of representation on the State School Board. Are there any provisions for something besides appointment if extenuating circumstances are found to exist...such as a candidate willfully misrepresenting his intention to abide by residency requirements of the office?

Tribune Article: Kyle Bateman "discovers" he lives out of area and declines State School Board 13 position

.

I underlined a couple of important passages of the article.

Key Questions that might be answerable: When did Kyle Bateman know of his residency problems? It appears to be a situation where he knew about this for some time. Did C. Mark Openshaw or others know of the probable outcome of the residency problems?

Key Question that we'll never know: Did Kyle Bateman seriously think it was OK to move outside of the district he was elected to represent? He signed an oath that he did...

Snarky, but relevant question: Does Mark Thomas of the Lt. Governor's office really think it's OK for candidates to lie on their oath and that it's up to others to challenge those assertions?! For example, how would one possibly prove that a candidate did or did not know of the residency requirement they were apparently planning to break soon after being elected?

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11006927
State ed board race winner drops out

Residency » Worried he didn't meet requirements.
By Lisa Schencker
The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated: 11/17/2008 07:18:01 PM MST

The winner of a recent state school board race has decided not to take his seat because of problems related to residency requirements.

Kyle Bateman, who won the race for the District 13 board seat two weeks ago, sent his letter of resignation Thursday. His opponent in the election, C. Mark Openshaw, will now likely take the seat, said Mark Thomas, administrator at the Lt. Governor's Office.

"This is just me trying to follow the law," Bateman said. "I would love to have served but I didn't want to get up there and find out there was a problem and create controversy."

Bateman said he has two homes -- one in his district in Provo and one that his company bought as an investment outside his district in Mapleton. He said he intended to live in the Mapleton home for a time and sell it eventually while keeping the Provo home as his primary residence.

In his letter, however, he said he sought private counsel, who recently told him the law "would not likely support" that arrangement.

Bateman said the confusion was due to a misunderstanding. State school board member Kim Burningham, however, said he believes Bateman purposefully waited until now to drop out.

"They knew this ages ago," Burningham said, referring to the residency problem, "and they have just purposefully manipulated it."

Burningham said he believes Bateman waited until now to drop out to prevent other, possibly anti-voucher candidates from appearing on the ballot. A total of six people originally vied for the seat. Those six names went to a governor-appointed committee, which narrowed the list to three candidates, ranked in order of the committee's preference. The governor then chose the top two ranked candidates to appear on the ballot.

Had Bateman dropped out after today -- the day election results become official -- the matter might have gone to the governor or to court, Thomas said.

Had Bateman dropped out much earlier, Openshaw might have had to run against the committee's third-ranked choice, A. LeGrand Richards, chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations at BYU.

"The democratic process has been totally sidestepped," Richards wrote in an e-mail Monday. "Voters were not allowed to decide on the candidates in the first place and now their choice doesn't matter either. It looks like a great way to stack the deck."

Bateman said he did not purposefully wait until now to withdraw to cut anyone out of the race.

"I don't know anything about that," Bateman said. "I'm not trying to play the system. I have nothing to gain from doing this."

Openshaw, co-founder and president of AirComUSA, a fax and business services company in Provo, said he also thinks Bateman's withdrawl was due to an honest misunderstanding.

"I don't think there's anything nefarious about it," Openshaw said. He said he thought Bateman would have made a good board member, but he'll take the seat if that's what state officials recommend.

Thomas said candidates sign an oath when they file for office stating that they meet the requirements, and it's up to others to challenge those assertions if they feel them to be untrue.

Several lawmakers and the governor are now pushing to change the election system to so voters directly elect board members instead of first sending the names through a committee and the governor.

More omnibus fun: SB 35 -- High quality smoke and mirrors brought to you by Howard Stephenson and Greg Hughes

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Howard Stephenson still surprises me with his relentless drive to attack public education so that his secret big business clients (Click on About Us and read the history and the 5th bullet under Association Purpose and Objectives) who bankroll the Utah Taxpayers Association can pay fewer taxes, regardless of the effectiveness or truth of the measure. I knew there were problematic aspects with SB 35, but I hadn’t realized exactly how much this bill had deceptively morphed into something much different than originally proposed, even when I briefly wrote about the timeline of its votes. I also listened to Greg Hughes interview Senator Hillyard last Saturday on Red Meat Radio (Senator Stephenson is the driving force and most frequent host of the show) and forcefully claim that the legislature is already ethical and transparent, and it’s just the unethical media who misportray the truth. Talk is cheap my legislative overlords, and stuff like I’m about to document is why people don’t trust you. I belatedly caught one more instance of ideological, secret agenda pushing here 8 months after the fact...how many more go unseen among the wheels within wheeled amendments at the legislature?

SB 35 was another bill logrolled into the omnibus education bill, SB 2. Unlike the million dollar laptop program, this bill had seemingly passed the Senate. Its path was a tortured one however and the bill that passed the Senate was NOT the same one that got illicitly passed in the omnibus.

First, the original SB 35 passed a vote in the Senate Education Committee on Jan. 22nd and then the first of two required floor votes in the Senate on the 30th. The bill was relatively short. If you read the Highlighted Provisions summary and the actual bill language, it directed the State School Board to annually survey the schools for difficult-to-fill science and math positions, create a “criticality index” to rank which positions were the most difficult to fill, and give $5,000 more dollars to a math or science teacher who accepted one of those positions. This rankled some teachers, but I thought it was a relatively good idea. If you need to pay teachers more at schools where fewer people want to work, that may be necessary in order to help kids. I had an acquaintance who moved to Dugway for a year to teach. I bumped into him the next summer and he was ecstatic about leaving. I personally think it’s noble, but there’s no way I would take my family to a rural school in the state.

A second thing that bothered teachers only emerged gradually: it wasn’t all math and science teachers who would qualify, only those teaching selected advanced classes, excluding other sciences such as Biology and implicitly the vast majority of jr. high math and science teachers.

70 (2) The money appropriated in Subsection (1) shall be used to provide a $5,000 salary
71 supplement for a full-time-equivalent position as a teacher of:
72 (a) mathematics level 3;
73 (b) mathematics level 4;
74 (c) chemistry;
75 (d) physics; or
76 (e) integrated science.

I’m not specifically clued in on the hiring difficulties of districts, but I was still mostly OK with this if it would help get some teachers to less desired areas. It was a relatively straight forward “market incentive” geared towards filling areas of need. There was nothing about teacher qualifications since the bill specifically addressed “teachers,” and all teachers already need a teaching certificate which requires a bachelor’s degree.

Senator Stephenson then amended his own bill on Feb. 5th, just before it passed the 2nd floor vote in the Senate. The new amended text now required that in order to get the $5,000 bonus, teachers that filled these positions of critical need had to have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent through later class work in the content area specifically, not the teaching specific degree that the vast majority of teachers get. So a Physics Teaching major who went to work on the Indian reservation school wouldn’t get the bonus because she didn’t get her bachelors in plain old Physics, and then pay the much more expensive post-graduate rates to earn the teaching certification. She would instead be punished for earning the certification as part of her undergraduate degree and moving quickly into the teaching area of greatest need. This angered a lot of teachers. Many debated if a Math major who later certified as a teacher was necessarily better than a teacher who entered teaching directly via a Math Teaching degree. And philosophically, this seemed to go against the supposed main thrust of the bill which was to find good certified teachers for hard-to-fill positions. It reduced the potential pool of qualified applicants by over 90% as very few secondary teachers have taken this route to certification. The change wasn’t consistent with the stated objective of the bill.

The bill passed the 2nd Senate floor vote, but I would be very interested in what debate took place and whether the legislators, with no time to study as the bill was passed soon after the amendment, fully realized the rather large shift in emphasis.

The amended SB 35 was then sent to the House and introduced on February 5th. It was sent to the House Education Committee on the 7th. This next sidenote worries me. I had thought that the bill records kept online were accurate and independent of politics. The official status log has no record of an Education Committee vote, but just shows the bill sitting in committee, not voted on, until the 27th. I took that information at face value when I was making my timelines and wondered why the bill got stuck.

I was recently fishing through old material and came across an update the UEA sent out on March 4th about the omnibus bill. It was talking about the defeated bills tacked on and specifically mentioned Senator Stephenson’s SB 35 as having been defeated in the House Education Committee on a tie vote. Hmmmm. Fishy. I checked back and the status still does not show that vote as having occurred. However, a new section has recently appeared on each bill’s information page titled Audio Recordings of Debates. (Did I miss an announcement of this at the Senate site?) This is great news! It absolutely was not there in early June when I previously wrote about this bill. This section contains a link to a House Education Committee debate on Feb. 27th, while the status still says no vote happened. Was it really debated and not voted on? Or is the UEA claim correct and there is something wrong with the record? And regardless, what discussions and negotiations happened in the 3 weeks from Feb, 7th until the bill was debated on Feb. 27th? An important factor was apparently the discovery by Greg Hughes that Margaret Bird, an employee of the State Board of Education, was going to exercise her constitutional right to run against him that Spring in a bid to win the Republican nomination to his House seat. I remember reading about Hughes angrily saying he couldn’t trust the state board back in February over this, but I didn’t save the articles. Bird and Carol Lear recently testified to the House Ethics Committee about the incident during an ethics hearing on charges against Rep. Hughes. Senator Stephenson apparently got in on the attacks as well.

I haven’t had time to listen to the debate yet, but I want to so I can gain some insight into the vote as well as the next transformation of SB 35. That same day, Feb. 27th, voted on or not I do not know, the bill was sent back to the House Rules Committee. That committee’s vice-chair happens to be Greg Hughes and it is chaired by voucher sponsor, Steve Urquhart. The bill was then substituted by Rep. Hughes on Feb. 29th and that is the end of the status of the original SB 35. Another strange inconsistency emerges at this point in the bill timelines. The original SB 35 status shows the bill being sent to rules on Feb. 27th and substituted on the 29th. The new 1st substitute inherited the voting history of the original bill, but now showed something different for those last days in February. There are two new entries, one on Feb. 27th and one on the 28th, both apparently sending the bill to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst (LFA) for fiscal analysis. Both timelines then agree that the substitute bill was put forth on the 29th. So what gives? Which bill was evaluated by the LFA, the original or the substitute, and why the discrepancy between the two status reports?

A substituted bill is in effect a new bill and must pass both houses in its new form to become a law. So SB 35, 1st Substitute now needed to pass both committee and floor votes in both chambers in order to become a law in the face of stiff opposition from teachers and legislative education supporters…except that Senator Stephenson was actively planning his SB 2 omnibus at this point and just decided to pass the bill the easy way—attach it to teacher raises and hold them hostage. He waited for the fiscal note, apparently for the correct version of the bill, from the LFA on March 3rd and immediately inserted the bill into the omnibus, SB 2, which was created that same day.

The new bill bore little resemblance to the original SB 35. The original bill called for 7 million Uniform School Fund dollars to the State Board of Education to be distributed through the districts as $5,000 bonuses to those teachers in critical need positions. The substitute was now over twice as long and featured an utterly bizarre set of new expenses.

First, it created a new “restricted” sub-account called the Teacher Salary Supplement Restricted Account, within the existing Uniform School Fund.

Second, it allocated $127,000 this year and an ongoing $190,000 every year hereafter from the General Fund to the Department of Human Resource Management to create an online application system to determine teacher eligibility for the bonuses, which then forwards the information to the Division of Finance, which then distributes that money to the districts, who then include the bonus in the teacher’s check. In other words, in order to do the same work the State Board of Education was prepared to do as just part of their duties, Hughes and Stephenson, the supposed “small-government” advocates, created a special account of education money specifically not accessible to the State Board of Education, and then inserted not one, but two additional bureaucracies as middlemen between the state and the teachers, all at an annual cost of $190,000. Stephenson regularly claims that public schools waste too much money in spite of class sizes consistently approaching 35 students, yet these two jokers can afford to spend $190,000 a year to redundantly sidestep the State Board of Education in order to teach some Board employee an important lesson about not running against incumbent Republicans because it hurts their feelings. And then Stephenson, co-chair of the committee that sets the board’s budget and the person who had just called Bird specifically to pressure her to drop out of the race, righteously claims that “he was careful not to pressure her.”

Third, the allocation for bonuses was also increased by $646,100, despite the fact that the bill’s provisions substantially reduced the pool of possible recipients. Finding 1400 spots to be defined as “critical shortages” in order to distribute the original $7 million was going to be a stretch anyway, depending on how you defined “critical.” Now in the substitute bill, I don’t believe for a second that Sen. Stephenson and Rep. Hughes thought they would find 1529 teachers holding one of that very limited range of degrees in order to distribute the $7,646,100 of annual bonus money available from the Uniform School Fund. I would be surprised if more than 5% of secondary science or math teachers held those degrees. It forces me to speculate that they are purposely withholding more Uniform School Fund money in that special “restricted” account than is strictly necessary to administer the bill in order to punish schools for opposing it.

Additionally, HB 35 1st Sub completely gutted the original purpose of the bill and revealed what appears to have been Stephenson’s intention all along, to delegitimize teachers as professionals and frame them as inferior to “real” mathematicians and scientists. The bill sneakily includes language about filling critical shortage in its Highlighted Provisions summary (Lines 20-22), despite there being absolutely no mention of that in the bill itself. I guess this would satisfy those legislators who only read the summary. The actual portions of the bill that are concerned with teacher salaries rather than four-bureaucracy-deep payment protocols decree that any teacher can now receive the $5,000, whether teaching in Parowan or the Wasatch Front, as long as he/she received a bachelor’s degree in a selected “hard” science and later became a teacher. “Critical shortages” are not addressed at all, and biology teachers and jr. high teachers are once again found less worthy than the high school teachers. The bill’s implicit purpose now apparently became to remake the teacher ranks by persuading scientists and mathematicians to become teachers by paying them $5,000 more than their colleagues. This was confirmed in the press conference introducing the omnibus on the afternoon of March 3rd when Senator Margaret Dayton rambled for a few minutes about how differentiated pay was going to make Utah "the feeder state for NASA.” (You can click through to the video and watch her speak if you wish.)

It seems to just be common sense that $5,000 won’t change much. I don’t believe there’s this huge pool of higher quality people than our current math and science teachers, just waiting to switch careers if only they could make an extra $5,000 a year.

More to the point of this post, Senator Stephenson and Representative Hughes surreptitiously changed the purpose of SB 35 to something completely different than originally voted for and what its own Highlighted Provisions purported it to be, added $190,000 of completely unnecessary duplication of services to grind a personal ax, and then dishonestly avoided debate by sticking it all into an enormous omnibus bill two days before the close of the session.

Dishonest. Unethical. Sneaky. Power hungry. Irrationally ideological. Take your pick. Trust is not won in an ethics hearing; it is won through transparent actions in the best interest of those citizens whom you represent.

Bob Bernick is not trustworthy…but Urquhart, Killpack, and co. are not telling the whole story about referendums either. A look at SB 53 and SB 54.

Bob Bernick is biased and unreliable and is correctly being called on it by Rep. Urquhart, BUT…our state legislators are also using his dishonesty to dance around the important issue of citizen redress because they ALREADY made major changes in referendums and initiatives this past session, making most submission dates even more difficult to meet and eliminating any land use referendums as another bone to powerful developers.

Bernick:

I first saw Bernick’s sloppiness clearly in his February story on conflicts of interest (Not saying it wasn't there before—I just wasn't paying attention to individual reporters until recently). I think it is a legitimate and very important issue, but Bernick lazily mixed the lesser number of substantive conflicts with broad accusations of conflict on very flimsy grounds (e.g. any lawyer proposing any bill having to do with law was conflicted and similar claims about other professions), even accusing Senate President Valentine of having conflicts on 3 completely empty "boxcar" bills. When the Senate leaders responded, Bernick threw a fit at being called lazy and unethical and counter-attacked Senators Dmitrich and Bramble for the extensive amounts of lobbyist gifts they accepted. Once again, I 100% agree with his position that Dmitrich and Bramble compromised their public trust and showed a continuing lack of ethics by accepting those trips and gifts (During a January Q&A session, Bramble tried to browbeat attending teachers in defense of his trips and Jazz games, daring us to “Raise your hand if you think that was a conflict of interest. Anyone? Anyone?” as he glowered around the room inviting some poor teacher to take him on.), but it has absolutely nothing to do with whether Bernick fabricated conflicts of interest about empty bills or not. Bernick’s latest claim that the legislature intended to make the signature gathering process for referendums more difficult, but then reversed course, is apparently another instance of “creative reporting” judging from the callout by Senator Killpack and Rep. Urquhart’s confidence that the tapes of the discussion will vindicate the legislators.

SB 53 and SB 54—Citizens’ rights of redress

That said, I feel Rep. Urquhart and Senator Killpack are being disingenuous as well. They didn’t make that one, specific change to the signature gathering requirements that Bernick is claiming, but they did pass two new laws restricting certain referendums and making the hoops more difficult for every type of referendum and initiative except statewide referendums—and I believe that is only because they were wary of just such an attack as Bernick made. So they left out the type of referendum they lost on to provide themselves some false moral high ground while simultaneously restricting the right of their constituents to affect the decision making process at all other levels of government. I don’t think there was a problem with the former requirements that needed to be addressed or any defensible rationale for the new restrictions on citizen redress. I personally asked Senator Bramble about his opinion on referendum law and the signature gathering requirements in the January meeting, heard his disdain for it as he explained similar points to what Bernick quotes him as saying (the people aren't informed, ancient pure democracies failed, California is worst state, etc.), and finally got his statement that he thought the bar for signatures was probably high enough so they wouldn’t change it this session. I feel he wasn’t quite straight with me on legislative intent since he didn’t mention the other crucial changes they were planning for referendum law.

Let’s look at the two laws. I want to start with the fact that both of these bills enjoyed near unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Insulating elected officials from those pesky citizens seems to be a bipartisan issue.

First, SB 53. The only legislators to vote against this boon to developers were Rep.’s Kiser and Newbold. I don’t know either well, but neither has previously voted against the Republican grain much, especially Newbold. I would love to hear their reasoning.

Here is pretty much the entire text of the bill. It’s one page, short and deadly. The law changes the previous text of state code which only referred to budgets (new stuff in italics).

Highlighted Provisions:
This bill:
prohibits the use of local initiatives for land use ordinances or changes in land use ordinances; and prohibits voters from requiring the implementation of a land use ordinance to be submitted to voters.
(1) The legal voters of any county, city, or town may not initiate [budgets]: (a) a budget or [changes] a change in [budgets.] a budget; or_(b) a land use ordinance or a change in a land use ordinance.
(2) The legal voters of any county, city, or town may not require any budget adopted by the local legislative body or the implementation of a land use ordinance adopted by the local legislative body to be submitted to the voters.

Why?! What purpose does this serve? I can see why changing an established budget would be problematic. Planning would be impossible and many companies would not contract with the city, county, etc. if they thought the rug could be pulled from them on a vote in a couple of months. And as important a duty as the budget is for a council or legislature, it is relatively short-term and impermanent. A newly elected administration can easily make changes to the next year’s budget.

Other laws and policies, however, have much more long-lasting effects that can be difficult or impossible to change after the fact. Land use laws seem to fit squarely in that category. City or county bodies making those important decisions can be as small as three people. If they change the zoning and allow a company or subdivision to be built, the government can’t go back and tear down those structures if the decision makers or general population have regrets afterwards. Now, there’s a philosophical argument against zoning and land use laws in general in favor of increased private property rights, but that’s a different issue. If zoning laws in general were to be refuted, that would affect both legislative and public decisions. But as long as we as a society have decided that some form of land use regulation is legal and in our best interest, and those decisions have irreversible, permanent effects, then why shouldn’t the people be able to hold initiatives or referendums on land use ordinances?! I can honestly see no other reason than to appease developers.

I suspect the true motivation behind this bill came specifically from Wendell Gibby, the controversial developer trying to build a subdivision on land Mapleton City contends is environmentally sensitive. Gibby is extremely well-connected and high-ranking state legislators have communicated their ability to curtail the powers of local government and written letters threatening the job of the judge of the lawsuit. Concerned citizens at one point tried to hold a referendum overturning a decision by Mapleton officials allowing Gibby to build, but were not allowed to contest "an administrative action." There may actually be some legitimate concerns and debate over the proper use of the government’s eminent domain powers in the Mapleton case, but why should the people’s right to question officials’ land use decisions in general be taken away? Who does that serve?

Another current example is the upcoming and hotly disputed referendum in Sevier County where many residents are trying to overturn a county commission’s decision to allow a coal power plant to be built in a certain valley. This referendum was grandfathered since the process began before the passage of SB53, but would currently be illegal. The fundamental question is whether a county’s general population should be able to decide whether to allow a power plant? Or should some maneuvering and designations of different acronyms allow a small number of county commissioners to make this irreversible decision?

As illustrated in the last link, the power company is using SB53, which passed after the referendum process had begun, to justify a lawsuit attempting to halt the referendum. A Beaver County development group is using the same tactic to try and stop a vote on their project as well.

Knowing some of the recent history of the legislature helps. The Realtor Association and PAC and property development lobbyists are by far the best-connected and influential special interest groups on Capital Hill and in my opinion behind some horrible laws and tax breaks. The most egregious example of literally taking away the voting rights of ordinary citizens is HB 466, commonly known as “The Developer’s Dream Bill," which the legislators unanimously passed in 2007 with little debate. This bill honestly gave a large land owner permission to start their own town, include other property owners against their wishes as long as the cumulative amount of their property was low, and then appoint the city council for the first two years, while the other US citizens who were annexed received no vote on their public officials for two years. The famous Ruby’s Inn right outside the entrance to Bryce Canyon National Park immediately incorporated, and now this literal “company town” where 73 of the 138 residents are relatives of the inn’s owner gets to pay itself $300,000 in taxes that used to help provide public services in sparsely populated Garfield County. There were at least two contentious attempts to incorporate towns of barely 100 people in Wasatch County, (Aspen, Utah unsuccessfully and Independence, Utah) and a contentious process is still going on today over the grandfathered incorporation of Powder Mountain as its own town with again the large corporation getting to hand-pick the mayor and city council of the town of under 150 people. The Weber County Forum and Ogden Valley Forum have frequently addressed this topic and examined the ridiculous nature of the bill’s process of incorporation:
http://wcforum.blogspot.com/2008/08/powder-mountain-update-last-chance-for.html
http://wcforum.blogspot.com/2008/08/powder-mountain-update-two-more.html
http://wcforum.blogspot.com/2008/08/powder-mountain-update-81908-commission.html
http://wcforum.blogspot.com/2008/08/powder-mountain-update-standard.html
http://ogden-valley.blogspot.com/2008/08/standard-examiner-steps-up-again.html

The legislature soon recognized how stupid their unanimous vote looked with the law’s “variety of unintended, and unpleasant, consequences” (This is a Senate Site post written by two senators and titled “The Unintended Consequences of 2007’s HB 466." Be sure to read the comments from angry residents of Daniel, Utah in Heber Valley, victims of one of the aforementioned incorporation attempts.) and “clearly” it needed amending. They passed a new law this year, HB 164, that changes the incorporation rules to not allow wealthy land owners to take away the vote of other citizens, but refused to make it retroactive, claiming it would be “unfair” to the developers. If you’re going to read only one of these links, read this WCF post on the amendment process, where Senator Christensen is quoted “I had no idea it was wrong at the time,” he said. “I think it flew past all of us.” I think that sums up why us citizens question the legislature anytime they want to take away our ability to vote on their decisions because they are so much better informed than us. As I said in a post earlier today, we often don't know as much about the inner-workings of many laws and processes, but we are just as capable of getting informed when something becomes very important to us. Many residents of Eden who are getting scooped up into Powder Mountain Kingdom know plenty about HB 466 now; many Beaver and Sevier County residents could tell you all about the flaws of SB 53; and it happened in the voucher debate. The elected representatives should gather information and legislate the majority of the time, but not feel territorial when the people want a say or try and protect their work from us.

SB 54 is a quieter bill that just tightens the screws a little bit, making it more unlikely that any of the above county or municipal referendums could ever happen. Speaker of the House Greg Curtis is the only legislator who voted against this bill on the floor. My negative opinion of Curtis leads me to believe this was some kind of stunt, and I did hear this mentioned once as “proving his independence” (on a bill he almost certainly knew would be passed unanimously before he allowed it onto the floor), but I don’t know for sure. I would love to hear his reasoning if indeed he disagrees with this bill.
The bill’s text is pages and pages long. Here’s the summary at the beginning of the bill—I’m leaving in the line numbers as I cut and paste this time because I don’t feel like deleting them all:

8 General Description:
9 This bill modifies provisions that govern requirements for state and local initiative
10 petitions and local referendum petitions.
11 Highlighted Provisions:
12 This bill:
13 . requires that a law that is proposed through a state or local initiative contain a title
14 that clearly expresses the subject of the proposed law;
15 . requires that a law proposed through a state or local initiative contain only one
16 subject;
17 . changes the deadline for submitting signature packets for statewide initiative
18 petitions from June 1 to April 15;
19 . changes the deadline for submitting signature packets for local initiatives and local
20 referenda from 120 days before the election to April 15;
21 . changes signature verification deadlines, circulation finance disclosure deadlines, and
22 appeal deadlines to accommodate the change in the deadline for submitting the
23 signature packets;
24 . moves referenda provisions related to the imposition of a county option sales tax
25 ordinance from Title 59, Revenue and Taxation, to the Election Code;
26 . provides that uniform signature verification timelines be applied to all local
27 referenda; and
28 . makes technical changes.

First, a side note. Think about the omnibus education bill lawsuit and notice the mind-boggling irony of lines 13-16. This is an addition, requiring the initiatives or referendums to have “a title that clearly expresses the subject of the proposed law” and that the proposal “contain only one subject.” It was specifically added under the sections for both state and local initiatives. Wouldn’t it have been funny if someone had filed an initiative with a broad title this year and the Attorney General’s office had to sue the filers for breaching this law while simultaneously defending SB2 on the same charges of breaking the Utah Constitution’s requirements for a clear title and single subject?

More on point, SB 54 moved the filing deadlines up almost 3 months for county and municipal referendums and initiatives (sometimes lumped together as “local” referendums and initiatives) and from July 1 to April 15 for statewide initiatives. I repeat my question: Why? What purpose does this bill serve or what problem does it address? The justifications used were to make it easier on county clerks and to make things “uniform.” I don’t see either one of those as justification for making an already onerous, difficult process even harder. As I understand it, an initiative or referendum drive has to gather signatures of 10% of the registered voters in a county or municipality to hold a local initiative or referendum. (And 10% of the registered voters in 26 of the 29 Utah counties for a state wide item. It was an amazing feat for the education community to gather those signatures in roughly 40 days. Does anyone reasonable think that is too long?) An occasional stressful period for clerks notified by the previous deadline, 120 days (4 months) before an election, is worth empowering the people to affect the legislative process. I can see the legislator’s arguments that there should be a relatively high bar to avoid crank legislation being on the ballot, but I see no evidence that frequent, “frivolous” referendums or initiatives have been on the ballot in Utah. I can personally remember a handful of initiatives, all in Salt Lake County, most dealing with some form of funding for public transportation, ZAP tax, and the like. I don’t agree with the outcome of all of those votes, but I feel the public is certainly justified in voting on the issue. Is there a list somewhere of what state, county, and local initiatives have been swamping our system with frivolity? (Here's a list of the 18 state wide initiatives and 2 state wide referendums in the last 48 years.)

And what about referendums? Again, I haven’t always been following the topic closely, but I don’t remember hearing about a public referendum on any level until the voucher vote last November. I certainly feel that vote was important and vindicating for the voice of the people, and the bar’s adequacy, or possibly overly rigorous nature, is illustrated by the fact that Referendum 1 was the first statewide referendum to successfully make it to the ballot in over 30 years. In fact the successful Referendum 1 on vouchers in 2007 and one other land use referendum in 1974 that failed to overturn the law it challenged are the only state wide referendums to make the ballot since 1960. Ballotpedia claims that hunters scared of animal rights initiatives were largely responsible for Utah's restrictive initiative and referendum laws. I don’t know enough to evaluate that assertion, but I don't view one successful referendum in 50 years as excessive. One could easily argue the opposite. I also agree with the premise that the Sevier County power plant referendum, the Beaver County zoning referendum, and the Box Elder County referendum on the sale of a county landfill approved by two possibly conflicted commissioners out of a three member county commission, are all appropriate and important exercises of the public’s right of ultimate authority over those voted into office to represent them, not rule them. These are the first local referenda I can recall hearing about and definitely not frivolous. If these important votes were the impetus for SB54, I think that making these local referenda more difficult was a corrupt decision from a bill largely designed and pushed by powerful development interests through their lobbyist, Steve Barth. Another argument for the too high bar is the difficulty of getting these referendums off the ground without some sort of organization. The forced stadium funding, where the state legislature passed a new law about county-assessed taxes in order to bypass the decision of the locally elected government body with which they disagreed and fund the Sandy soccer stadium (to benefit, of course, a very well-connected and wealthy developer, Dave Checketts) was an even more unpopular decision than vouchers. The referendum to overturn the law barely got off the ground and couldn't get close to the required number of signatures by the former, easier deadline because it was too hard to get volunteers and action organized. If something as stinky and top-down as the stadium funding switcharoo can’t get access to the ballot, that bar is very, very high. In their supposed quest to guard the process from "special interests," legislators may have effectively barred the process to all but those organizations with large numbers of motivated volunteers.

And finally, my argument about the relative hypocrisy of the legislator’s impassioned defense of current law. Notice they changed both referendum and initiative requirements at the municipal and county level, and also the state wide initiative requirements. If the new dates are so important and justified by the overworking of the clerks, why omit state wide referendums, which require a much higher number of signatures and verification work than local referendums? Political cover. The legislature can’t justify the new requirements because of any actual problems, but they are willing to restrict the voice of the people anyway, understanding that 99% of the population will never notice or think about a low-flying law like SB54. As long as they don't touch the current lightning rod of state referendums, they feel safe in cutting the people out of the process more and more.

So when an editorial claims that “Bramble, Valentine, and Rep. Steve Urquhart, of St. George, unequivocally told the D-News from the start that there was nothing wrong with Utah's referendum system and it wasn't up for change.” take it with a large grain of salt. I totally agree the Deseret News should release the recording and that Bernick is often an inaccurate blowhard, but I don’t take the righteous chest thumping of vote-restricting legislative leadership figures at face value.