Not only is the entire top tier of the Corrections Department administration new to the job, the staffers running the statewide sex offender registry that tells the public where registered sex offenders live have practically no experience either.

The result, say a number of law enforcement officials who deal with sex offenders, is a delay of several months in updating addresses and other ID information on the more than 7,000 registered sex offenders in Utah.

"It appears that the wheels have come off the bus, so to speak, and I don't see that there are any near-future solutions to the problem. I think that if the general public knew what state the registry was in, they would be alarmed and upset," said one sex crimes investigator in a memo to his superior that was copied to me by concerned members of the law enforcement community. "The fact is that the public believes and expects that by searching their [ZIP] code for sex offenders they will have current information. I believe that this is fundamentally incorrect and it appears that there are many examples to show that the information is not up to date or correct," the memo said.

I talked to officers in eight law enforcement agencies about the problem. Five said there were problems with the registry; three had not encountered problems.

Deputy Corrections Director Robyn Williams says when the new administration came in, there was a backlog of 500 to 600 names to update, but after farming work out to the regional offices, the department is two weeks away from being completely current.

That claim is disputed by several law enforcement agents who supply the registry with information, as well as by former employees of the department. They say the problems began after the new administration changed the staff, moving out registry administrators with years of experience and replacing them with novices.

There used to be five full-time and five part-time staffers. But the part-timers were fired and the department has been slow to replace the full-timers, who either were transferred or quit. There are now five full-time registry employees, but two were hired just a couple of weeks ago.

In case of emergency: Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson was among a group of city officials invited to observe and participate in a mock emergency exercise at the Salt Lake City Public Safety Building recently.

The officials got to see how first-responders come together in an emergency situation and did mock exercises on what they would do in their own role as public officials.

But Anderson missed a little bit of the emergency training exercise. As he was traveling from one floor to another in the 49-year-old emergency services building, the elevator broke and he was trapped.

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