Mainly for archival consistency, we'll do a somewhat brief legislative session post-mortem on one of the "good" bills which failed to make it through the legislature this year, due to the running of the clock. We devoted substantial electronic ink to House District 8 Representative Gage Froerer's HB 201 during the 2009 legislative session, which would have re-enfranchised the hapless citizens of Ogden Valley's "Powderville," and given them their own vote on whether to be dragged unwillingly into Powder Mountain's incipient company town.
Although the bill picked up a good head of steam earlier this month, passing in the House on March 6 by a lopsided 52-17 vote, HB 210 was effectively killed in the Senate. For reasons unknown, Senate leadership inexplicably sat on the bill for almost a full week, and then sent it back to the House on March 12, the final day of the legislative session, with a meaningless and trivial "amendment."
During yesterday's blog discussion, several of our gentle readers were critical of Rep. Froerer, for his failure to ultimately deliver the goods. We believe this criticism is entirely unfair, and completely off the mark. We were in steady communication with Rep. Froerer throughout this session; and we're aware that our Legislative District 8 Representative worked feverishly on this legislation. The bill's quick and successful passage in the House is ample proof of that, we think.
So we'll attempt to set the record straight. Make no mistake. The responsibility for failure of this bill rests entirely upon the shoulders of Senate GOP leadership (so-called.) If GOP leadership had considered re-enfranchising the citizens of "Powderville" to have been a priority, believe us, the bill would have been (and ought to have been) quickly delivered to the Senate floor on a silver platter.
If you have lingering anger and angst over the failure of the legislature to correct it's own egregious mistake, please don't mis-direct it to second-term House Representative Froerer, who worked his tail off on this, but unfortunately has a lot more political juice in the House than in the Senate.
If you're looking for somebody to blame for this latest legislative miscarriage of justice, these are the culprits, O Gentle Ones, the ones with an (R) to the right of their names:
• Utah State Senate - "Leadership" 2009If you decide to write to complain, the perpetrators are the ones with an "R" next to their names. We don't know why these people decided to let Froerer's bill die on the vine; but they did. Strangely, Utah citizens keep electing these same people again and again.
Consider this a weekend kickoff open topic thread.
The world blogosphere awaits your ever-savvy comments.
