This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It isn't the things we don't know that give us trouble, Will Rogers said, it's the things we do know that just aren't so.
As more digging is done into the reasons why leaders of the Utah Legislature found it necessary to make their nearly successful attempt to gut the state's open records law, it becomes more apparent that many of the offered justifications for the action were just not so.
A public outcry resulted in the bill of goods known as HB477 being repealed last week. But as the postmortems continue, it appears more and more clear that many of the lawmakers who supported the bill did so based on faulty information provided to them by those they should most be able to trust — their leadership.
House Speaker Becky Lockhart and Senate President Michael Waddoups put the arm on their members to not only pass the bill that took so much of the meaning out of the state's Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA, but also to do so at breakneck speed, late in the session, with no meaningful expert advice or public input.
They claimed that citizens and reporters had inundated the 2010 session of the Legislature with GRAMA requests that ate up more than 400 hours of staff time, much of it spent by the relatively high-priced lawyers on the lawmakers' staff.
The other boogeyman was the suggestion that lawmakers' personal emails, with private details of their own lives, their outside business interests, their families' doings and the individual anguish of aggrieved constitutents would be ripe for the taking under an unamended GRAMA.
How to determine the truth about the anti-GRAMA arguments? Why, use GRAMA, of course.
So The Salt Lake Tribune did. And the findings were troublesome, to say the least.
The 400-hour figure was based on a reasonably informed guess, which, as staff members were pressed to back it up with figures, fell apart as greatly exaggerated. And the claim that private data is all too easily subject to GRAMA-based revelation withered under the revelation that requests for such information are routinely denied.
Members of the Legislature are called upon to make a lot of decisions, in a short period of time, based on a rapid flow of information. It now seems that one important way for them to know what among all that information is accurate is a robust open records law.
Which is why elected officials, as much as anyone else, should be skeptical of anyone who claims that the process will work better in the dark.