A Pair of Utahns for Ethical Government Post Public Hearing Writeups

We predict the initiative measure will find its way to the 2010 ballot, despite last night's low citizen turnout

On the heels of yesterday's reminder of last night's ethics reform public hearing, we're pleased to deliver two post-meeting writeups this morning:

First, Standard-Examiner editorial page editor Doug Gibson has made it a topic of discussion this morning on his blog, where this morning's post has already drawn several reader comments:

• At the Utahns for Ethical Government hearing in Ogden

And Std-Ex reporter Roy Burton provides a straight news writeup on the Std-Ex Live! site:

• Ethics commission could be on Utah ballot in 2010

We also received an interesting comment in the previous comments section, from a reader who identified himself as Mark Johnson last night, suggesting that the low public turnout at last night's meeting indicated citizen disinterest in the ethics reform initiative:

Ten people there, I guess that is not a issue in Weber County.

(Doug Gibson also commented about the low turnout, which he estimated to be about thirty lumpencitizens.)

Here's our take on that. There's a big difference in the level of personal commitment necessary to propel a large crown of lumpencitizens to a remote junior high gymnasium for an informational meeting on a single Tuesday night, and the relatively slight effort needed lure a large group of individual voters to a variety of centralized locations for the affixation of signatures over the course of six months. UEG promoters have a full half-year to gather the requisite 95,000 signatures. We'll thus confidently go out on a limb and predict that they'll gather that number and many more, well before the April 2010 deadline.

Once the petitions are distributed, we'll post an article with instructions about how to sign the petition, of course.

Power to the People, Right On!