The UPEA fought hard in past legislative sessions. It prevented lawmakers from axing the employees' ability to have political action committee contributions deducted automatically from their paychecks.

But, despite those past efforts to empower public employees, the UPEA now finds itself trying to halt a decline in dues-paying members. If its recent record is any indication of its effectiveness, it is unlikely the UPEA can halt the growing defection.

Public employees, along with veterans, the elderly and the poor, took big hits in the 2005 legislative session, and some workers wonder who is watching their backs.

It's not that the UPEA isn't trying, but some decisions its board and officers have made recently seem to have been, to put it kindly, ill-advised.

We'll start with the firing nearly two years ago of UPEA's longtime lobbyist Nancy Sechrest, who also had served as the association's president and executive director.

Some suspected that the sudden dusting of Sechrest - she was fired with no notice shortly after receiving a contract extension - had to do with UPEA's fear of Marty Stephens, who at the time was speaker of the Utah House and was preparing to run for governor.

Sechrest had opposed Stephens on several issues and had supported candidates who were rivals of Stephens in the Republican Party.

But that suspicion was denied by UPEA leaders, who claimed to have a good relationship with Stephens and other legislative leaders. One board member said the decision was economic, that money could be saved by lobbying in-house rather than through a contract lobbyist.

Shortly after the Sechrest firing, however, the UPEA hired two contract lobbyists, Mont Evans, former state senator and Riverton mayor, and former Speaker of the House Mel Brown.

While Brown had been a rival of Stephens in the speaker's race, Evans had close ties to Stephens and was a lobbyist for the Utah Bankers Association, an organization also close to Stephens, a one-time Zions Bank employee.

And that's where the interests of state employees might have fallen through the cracks.

Evans is adept at recruiting candidates and training them on effective campaign techniques. He did a good job getting candidates friendly to his client - the Utah Bankers Association - to run for and win legislative seats. Those newcomers then could be considered beholden to Evans, and most of them voted for Greg Curtis for House speaker, Jeff Alexander for House majority leader and Stephen Urquhart for House majority whip.

All three have been bank-friendly in the banks' ongoing battles with the credit unions. And all three have been less than friendly to public employees.

It is against House rules for lobbyists to try to influence leadership races, an edict initiated by Stephens, who felt he lost his first bid for speaker because of the influence of lobbyists, particularly Sechrest.

But Evans was accused of lobbying for the bank-friendly trio who eventually won their leadership races.

Rep. David Ure, who was Curtis' opponent for speaker, complained in a letter to Utah Bankers Association executive director Howard Headlee that Evans had violated House rules by lobbying for Curtis and others in the leadership races.

Headlee reportedly fired Evans for the alleged indiscretion, but reinstated him after investigating the complaint and deciding there was not enough evidence that Evans directly interfered in the races to warrant such a sanction.

Two years ago, Evans was instrumental in helping Dana Love defeat Rep. Paul Ray in a Republican primary in Davis County. Love was a bank-friendly candidate while Ray was employed at the time by a credit union. But Ray also was seen as one of public employees' strongest supporters in the House. Ray won back his seat last fall after returning the favor to Love by defeating her in the primary.

The other UPEA lobbyist, Brown, was busy this year with a landfill company he helped put together, which successfully got a resolution passed expanding the types of refuse it can accept at its Tooele County site. Brown's company now is turning over the landfill operation to nationwide giant Allied, at a pretty profit for himself and his partners.

So Brown did well personally this legislative session and Evans' primary client, the Utah Bankers Association, successfully pushed through a controversial resolution asking Congress to let states tax federally chartered credit unions.

Public employees, meanwhile, lost the benefit of swapping unused sick leave for health insurance coverage when they retire and saw the state personnel office shoved back into administrative services, adding a layer of bureaucracy between employees and the office that oversees them.

Maybe worst of all, during a flush budget year, public employees got nowhere near the pay increase they hoped would make up for the lean years of practically no wage hike.