Please excuse state Sen./Rep. for being away from home, and on the taxpayers' dime, for the week of July 19-23 while he/she was attending the National Conference of State Legislatures Annual Meeting and Exhibition in Salt Lake City.

The NCSL convention is no exotic junket where lawmakers are wined and dined by the rich and powerful and the toughest policy decision is whether everybody is up for one more cocktail party.

It is five days packed with presentations, debates and committee hearings on serious issues, from health care to national security, from higher education to the definition of marriage.

By the time it's over, the delegates will try to take formal, informed and broadly bipartisan positions on many issues which Congress and the White House increasingly hand down to the states, without bothering to pass along the money needed to do the job.

Not that Salt Lake City isn't a wonderful place to visit. Not that the downtown restaurants and hotels weren't more than glad to have the 4,000 or so visitors and their expense accounts in town. And not that we have any proof that your legislator necessarily spent every minute of every day in the Salt Palace seminar rooms and not by the hotel pool.

But there's no golf tournament attendant to the convention. Ski season is over. Even offered visits to Antelope Island or the giant Kennecott Copper Mine have their public policy - conservation and reclamation - aspects.

Most important this year, a combination of Utah's liquor laws and its even drier wells of lobbyist funding meant that the focus of the event was the important stuff of running state government and, with any luck, learning something about problems faced and solved in other states that might work in yours.

This year, our Utah House Speaker Marty Stephens is also president of NCSL. He's a pretty serious guy, a banker by trade, whose idea of a national convention is more boot camp than resort. (At 7 a.m.: The Outlook for Energy Supplies and Prices. At 9:30 a.m.: Financing Clean Water - The Versatile Uses of State Revolving Funds.)

Stephens is also leaving public office come the first of the year, so the big corporate donors who have kicked in a lot of the $700,000 this convention is costing were not buying much influence with him, nor with the thousands of lawmakers who will soon return to make decisions in states where PacifiCorp and Zions Bank don't have any political interests.

Maybe that's why the convention budget had to be cut from the original $1.2 million.

Maybe that's why government officials should meet here more often.