The Utah Constitution gives the Legislature power to draw new boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts after the U.S. census every 10 years. The sponsors of an initiative petition want to create an independent redistricting commission that would do a fairer job because, unlike sitting legislators, the commissioners would not be interested in keeping themselves in office by gerrymandering district boundaries. We support that petition.

The petition sponsors must gather 95,000 signatures statewide to place their proposal on the November 2010 ballot. When the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget estimated that the commission would cost $1 million, the petitioners filed a challenge with the Utah Supreme Court, arguing that the estimate was too high.

The estimate assumed, erroneously in our view, that two staffs would have to prepare separate redistricting plans simultaneously for the Legislature and for the commission. The petition sponsors pointed out that their proposal provides that the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel, which already provides redistricting staff to the Legislature, would do the same job for the commission, so the duplication of services anticipated in the $1 million estimate was wrong.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not see the issue that way. It held that because the proposal does not "prohibit the Legislature from undertaking separate research and analysis of redistricting issues at any time," the petition could not be read to imply otherwise. We think that's a tortured reading of the petition, and that the justices missed the point of the process that the petition creates.

However, we understand that even if the commission were created, the Legislature would have final authority to adopt or reject its recommendation. It is conceivable that a pig-headed Legislature could run its own redistricting shop parallel to the commission's, and reject the commission's proposal when it was presented to the Legislature, adopting one more to its liking. But the Legislature still would have to prepare a plan using the same numbers and scoring matrix that the commission would have to follow, and lawmakers would have to explain to voters why they wasted so much money running two separate redistricting programs and ignoring the commission's recommendations.

Bottom line: Voters should not be deterred from supporting the initiative because of its price tag. Even at $1 million, unlikely though that is, it's a reasonable price to pay every 10 years for gerrymander-proof government.