As Randy Jackson might put it, the trustees at the Utah Transit Authority are a little pitchy, dawg, if not downright tone deaf, when it comes to ethics. Allow us to elaborate.

Terry Diehl is a real estate developer who has served on the UTA board for 10 years. A legislative audit last year recommended that a case involving Diehl be referred to prosecutors to decide whether a criminal charge should be filed. The case concerned real estate near a proposed FrontRunner station at 13500 South and whether Diehl had properly disclosed a conflict of interest arising from a transit-oriented development he wanted to build near the station.

The auditor and the legislative general counsel argued that Diehl had violated the law. The UTA's lawyers said he had not. The legislators on the audit committee decided not to refer the case for charges, in part because Diehl had followed the advice of the UTA lawyers.

Fast forward to this month. Diehl is resigning from the UTA board, but he still wants to pursue transit-oriented development. However, a UTA policy prohibits former trustees from doing business with UTA within one year after they leave the board. As a parting gift to Diehl, the board has decided to waive that policy in his case.

How does this sound to the public? It sounds like Diehl is being eased off the board because of the ethical cloud that his earlier dealings caused. But, incredibly, the UTA trustees have waived an ethics policy that is obviously intended to prevent a former board member from doing a deal that might raise ethical questions.

The explanation for the board's action sounds even stranger. Chairman Greg Hughes says that Diehl actually would have more freedom to do transit-oriented development if he remained on the board, so long as he disclosed his involvement and recused himself, than he would if he left the board and tried to do a deal within one year. But if that is the case, UTA's ethics policies are seriously defective.

UTA has maintained throughout the Diehl case that he did nothing wrong because he never acted on insider information. All of the information about UTA's plans and stations were in the public record, according to UTA's attorneys, so there was no violation.

But that doesn't wash. It doesn't take account of the inside knowledge a trustee has of UTA's processes and people, which confers an advantage.

It appears that UTA is not only tone deaf. It is willfully blind as well.