Today, I took some time out of my busy schedule of, umm, doing important stuff, in order to read up on bills currently being considered in the Utah Legislature. A few I found interesting:

1. One of my personal favorites, S.B. 96, from Rep. Buttars, titled “Public Education - Instruction and Policy Relating to the Origins of Life”. I’d give this one an award for “Most unintelligent design”. This bill would require teachers to stress that not all scientists agree on one view of how life originated or the present state of the human race. It further requires other scientific theories regarding such matters be presented to students. This bill only makes sense if extreme liberties are taken with the definition of “scientists” and “scientific”. I am unaware of any scientific alternatives to evolution, unless “scientific” includes “religious”.

2. Doug Aagard’s HB 12 gets the “Worst Timing” award. This bill amends GRAMA (Government Records Access and Management Act) to restrict the public’s access to the correspondence of our elected officials. So, let me see if I understand this properly - It is ok for the government to spy on us (even sans warrant), but us getting access to the correspondence of our publicly elected officials is not ok? Right. I’m sure this makes perfect sense in some parallel universe or something. Now, even though I’m a big proponent of transparency in our government, I don’t know that this bill is so terrible by itself. With all of the very recent corruption scandals we’ve seen in the government, however, it doesn’t seem like the perfect time to introduce legislation that would make such corruption even easier.

3. Al Mansell’s SB 170 was really long. Of course, when you are destroying local control of property development and zoning, it pays to be thorough. Given Mansell’s ties to big developers (he even was the president of the NAR in 2005), this bill is quite surprising. Well, not that surprising actually.

4. Howard Stephenson’s SB 156 made me laugh. Well, not the bill itself, but this part at the bottom “Based on a limited legal review, this legislation has not been determined to have a high
probability of being held unconstitutional.” Whoever wrote that probably didn’t realize that amendments to the constitution count too, when deciding whether or not a particular piece of legislation will be held unconstitutional. This bill would make it so the legislature could pick the nominees for each party, and then make the Senators come back and consult with the legislature at their whim. I’m torn between the fact that it seems so flagrantly in conflict with the 17th amendment and the miniscule possibility that Orrin Hatch may be called back to explain to the legislature why he is so damn insane.

There were a few economic development bills that looked interesting at first glance, and I will probably comment more positively on those later. I think the next few years are going to be exciting for Utah, economically, largely due to the amount of venture capital heading our way and the fund of funds coming online shortly.