In fact, a deputy district attorney called the plan, concocted by Allied and former county public works director John Patterson, and presented on Patterson's last day on the job, "ambiguous" and unenforceable. In other words, garbage suitable for hauling to the landfill.

An earlier letter from the county district attorney's office in December said such a contract would be financially detrimental to the landfill, the county and Salt Lake City, which also is a party to the current waste-disposal arrangement.

The county auditor called it a "sweetheart deal" for Allied. The company would have netted $750,000 a year in the process of taking over many of the hauling and landfill operations now done by county employees.

Other private waste contractors were rightly indignant over the memorandum of understanding, as it ignored the open bidding process the county is legally bound to follow.

Besides that, details of the plan were questionable; the numbers didn't add up. Allied was to have received $23.85 per ton for garbage hauled to its new dump in Tooele, even though county auditors found the market rate for trash hauling is closer to $21 per ton. The county would have received $22 per ton in tipping fees for the 600 tons of trash Allied would deliver daily to the county landfill in west Salt Lake City.

The district attorney's office was right to put the kabosh on this covert arrangement. Patterson's office should have given it up after receiving the first warnings. The plan has that scent of impropriety, or worse, that has wafted before from some county operations.

It is just more evidence - as if county officials needed more after a string of scandals over the past couple of years - that the best policy is to stick to time-tested ways of doing things, in no small part because they happen to be legal. Open bidding is the only proper way to contract for county services when privatizing is proven to be the best course.

Any other way is, as the district attorney's office pointed out, unwise and ill-advised.