Utah’s transparency problem. Eric Ethington. Op Ed Salt Lake Tribune.

      Eric Ethington is interim communications director for Alliance for a Better UTAH.
During the 2012 legislative session, Sen. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem, succeeded in passing SB21, which effectively stripped several environmental regulatory boards of the requirement that their membership include medical practitioners, replacing it with a requisite for "industry representatives." Utah’s Radiation Control Board, responsible for the regulation and oversight of radiation within our state, is the first to be affected.

In a further affront to transparency, the Legislature has continued its refusal to apply a fee waiver exception to the release of redistricting information to the State Democratic Party, as well as to The Salt Lake Tribune and ABC4. The documents have been prepared. The work has been done. The Democrats paid the $5,000 they were originally quoted. But now the Legislature wants another $10,000 to release the records on the basis that release of the information is not in the public’s interest.

Redistricting is a critically important undertaking, with a wide-ranging impact on our democratic process, and it received enormous public attention. It involved dozens of public meetings and, no doubt, hundreds of closed-door meetings. It is hard to imagine anything more in the public’s interest than understanding how the outcome came to be, yet the Legislature has erred on the side of secrecy rather than transparency.  Eric Ethington. Salt Lake Tribune.