This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Perhaps it's time for Brian Barnard to do his thing again.
The veteran Salt Lake City attorney made a name for himself in the 1970s and '80s by finding old laws in the state code that clearly were unconstitutional. He would find a plaintiff, sue the state in federal court for violating his plaintiff's constitutional rights, win the case in a settlement and collect attorney fees from the state.
The Legislature has a poor track record when it comes to constitutional law. Lawmakers have consistently ignored warnings of constitutional violations when passing such laws in the past as cable TV regulation and abortion bans. They got sued, spent millions of dollars of your money defending the laws and lost.
Now, the Legislature insists on keeping its law against acts of sodomy between consenting adults, despite a U.S. Supreme Court holding that such laws are unconstitutional. Lawmakers killed a bill by Sen. Scott McCoy, D-Salt Lake City, to repeal the clearly unconstitutional law.
If Barnard could find a plaintiff and sue the state, it might be as entertaining as the time former Utah Attorney General David Wilkinson refused to pay Barnard's court-ordered fee after he won one of those suits against the state. When Barnard got a judge to garnish Wilkinson's salary, the attorney general promptly paid his fee.
Divine Strake fallout? Watch for KTVX, Channel 4 co-anchor Ruth Todd to disappear from the air within the next few days. Her contract expires this week and, reportedly, it won't be renewed.
In a few weeks, according to rumblings among TV news types around town, the other Channel 4 anchor, Terry Wood, will be demoted to weekends.
Why?
The scuttlebutt around town is that KTVX's owner, Texas-based ClearChannel, went into a tizzy over the station's editorializing against Divine Strake, an idea that came out of the administration of George W. Bush, a particular darling of the redder-than-red owners of ClearChannel.
And does it matter that the administration finally caved to public pressure and canceled the megabomb test just outside Utah's borders?
Apparently not.
The Buddy System: The Utah House of Representatives last week passed HB325, which would let billboard companies locate a sign within a half-mile of an existing location in a commercial or construction zone without needing the city's approval.
The League of Cities and Towns, which is supposed to represent cities and towns, did not put up any opposition to the bill.
Could that be because the sponsor of the bill is Rep. Mel Brown, R-Coalville, and the attorney and land-use analyst for the League of Cities and Towns is Jodi Hoffman, a partner with Brown in Wasatch Regional Solid Waste Management Corp.?
Wasatch bought land from the Schools and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which Brown helped create with legislation and later lobbied for. Wasatch then sold it to Allied Waste for a landfill in Tooele County and Wasatch's partners get royalties from the waste deposited there.