DID OREM CITY OFFICIALS SIGN NON-DISCLOSURE FORMS IN SECRET MEETINGS TOO?
BRIGHAM CITY -- A number of city officials have
signed non-disclosure agreements requested by UTOPIA before they were briefed
on coming plans by the high-speed fiber-optic internet company.
The non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, are common in private industry.
But UTOPIA, for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, is a
cooperative publicly owned by Brigham and 12 other cities.
Brigham is committed to $430,000 a year in bond payments for 25 years,
issued as part of UTOPIA's late 1990s startup, officials said.
Layton is signed up to the tune of $2.1 million a year in bond payments
for the fiber-optic company, officials said.
But officials in both towns agreed not to disclose details publicly of
two sets of meetings with UTOPIA officials in recent weeks covering coming
plans for the agency, long mired in the red.
Jason Roberts, Brigham's finance director, in September briefed the city
council on the fact the company's operating losses, once at $3 million a year,
are currently down to $2.4 million a year.
But of the secret meetings with UTOPIA on Nov. 4 in the city offices and
a week earlier in Salt Lake City attended by he and other city officials who
signed their NDAs, Roberts said he could only say the meetings were positive.
"I did not take it as bad news in any shape or form," Roberts
said. "And it will be fully disclosed before any action is taken."
He said he couldn't predict when that action, in public, would be taken.
He said he could say the NDA involved the interest of a third-party, relating
to proprietary concerns about internal business operations.
City Attorney Kirk Morgan echoed that, and said he advised city
officials they were safe, on legal ground, in signing the NDAs.
"UTOPIA has never done this before, and it only applied to this one
set of meetings," Morgan said. "My assumption is the non-disclosure
agreements have to terminate at some point. The council can't vote on something
without discussing it. That's the only way it would get approved."
Morgan said he did not attend the meetings, so didn't sign an NDA, but
insisted "the only way for UTOPIA to do anything by way of a major change
is by a public vote, with whatever proposal ratified in a public meeting."
Layton City Attorney Gary Crane said he advised his city officials to go
ahead and sign the NDAs for the meetings. He signed one himself.
He said they did involve a third party with proprietary concerns, and in
fact it was the third party which requested UTOPIA collect the NDAs.
"In the course of looking at various options, it's not unusual for
a private business to request public officials sign NDAs," Crane said.
"The Governor's Office of Economic Development does it all the time with
incoming businesses they're recruiting.
"I don't know why it's such a big deal," he said. "It's
just information gathering, not decision-making."
One who refused to sign her NDA was Brigham City Councilwoman Ruth
Jensen.
"I'm not going to sign non-disclosures so UTOPIA can waste more of
our money in closed sessions," she said. "It's sneaky and
under-handed and could be a violation of the state's open meetings law."
Contact reporter Tim Gurrister at 801-625-4238, tgurrister@standard.net. Follow him on
Twitter at @tgurrister
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