Fine guest commentary in this morning's Deseret News, by Jeffrey L. Novak, Chairman of the Coalition for Ethics and Accountability in Government:
• Utah deserves independent ethics commissionOnce again the same familiar pattern was repeated by the 2009 State Legislature. The Utah electorate was screaming for legislative ethics reform. Once again the 2009 session was kicked off by grand statements from the legislature that a serious effort would be made (this time) to enact robust ethics reform legislation. Once again the legislature dawdled, quarrelled, sat on its thumbs and finally delivered laughably paltry legislation which (even with the utmost generosity extended to the legislature) could only be described as "meager and weak."
Forty other states have already decided that it is necessary to divorce the oversight of ethical conduct from their legislative systems.
Time for Utah to adopt a system whereby somebody other than the foxes are delegated the responsibility of guarding the hen house, we believe.
If it takes a constitutional amendment to accomplish this, let's get to it, Utah Lumpencitizens.
And what say our gentle readers about all this?
