But Mayor Peter Corroon says that is one reform that goes too far.

The unusual move - Cabinet meetings would have to be advertised in advance, open to the public and the news media and recorded under Utah's Open Meetings Act - is not required on the state or national level or in any other Utah county.

Wilde says the motivation for his ordinance - which goes before the County Council today - comes from the old mayor, not the new one. He said he doesn't want to see sequels of the scandals that unfolded under fellow Republican Nancy Workman.

"There's the problem in a nutshell," Wilde says. "That's what we're trying to get away from in government."

But Deputy Mayor Karen Suzuki-Okabe, a Democrat, says the requirement is too stringent, particularly for an administration that campaigned on and now counts openness as its hallmark.

"It's not broken, so I don't know why you particularly need it," Suzuki-Okabe says.

Corroon was in Washington on Monday and unavailable for comment. But his deputy listed the cost of filing notice of the Cabinet meetings and being forced to gather weekly as common concerns. She also said sensitive subjects would remain secret if reporters were invited.

"The discussion does somewhat change," says Suzuki-Okabe, who worked under Gov. Mike Leavitt and Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis, whose Cabinet meetings were never advertised. "You'll have kitchen Cabinet meetings pop up as a result."

That means smaller groups of top aides could huddle - as long as they don't constitute a quorum - and not violate the proposed ordinance, says Karl Hendrickson, chief deputy for the District Attorney's Office.

Alan Dayton, Workman's deputy mayor who later "encouraged" open Cabinet meetings under an ethics overhaul he pushed as acting mayor, cheered the stricter statute. Had Workman's Cabinet meetings been held to that standard, he said, suspicions about clandestine behavior could have been avoided.

"If [the mayor's office] loosens the grip on secrecy, it will end up serving them better," Dayton says.

The current system allows "anything they want to do" behind closed doors, says Wilde, who wants the meeting rules to be uniform between the council and mayor.

"If you have an executive that is trying to be secretive, they can tell anybody, 'get lost,' ” Wilde says.

Democratic Councilman Joe Hatch, who supports the bulk of Wilde's plan, says the move has less to do with Corroon - "I've met more with Peter in the two months he's been in office than the four years Nancy was in office" - than establishing a tradition for future officeholders.

"It's a good time before we forget the mistakes of the Workman administration."

djensen@sltrib.com