REPORT CARD: SOME OF UTAH'S LAWMAKERS EARN AN A+ FOR THEIR PROFICIENCY IN GETTING THEIR BILLS PASSED. OTHERS DIDN'T DO AS WELL AND SCORED POORLY IN EFFECTIVENESS. Utah's legislators decide how much tax you pay, what crimes you can be tried for, your child's college tuition and whether your freeway will be repaired.
That's some pretty serious stuff. But when the 63 House members and 11 senators up for re-election this year come asking for your vote, how are you going to decide if they deserve it?Maybe you'll talk to some friends, maybe read the legislator's campaign brochure - if you're lucky enough to find one on your doorstep three days before the election.
Public opinion polls show few Utahns can name their legislators; fewer still have any working knowledge of how their House or Senate member is doing.
To help educate voters, the Deseret News is continuing a decade-old practice of compiling a "legislative report card." The report card runs in legislative re-election years and details how many bills each of Utah's 104 legislators sponsored - and how many passed into law. lawmakers, lobbyists, legislative staff members and executive and judicial branch officials who have frequent contact with legislators during the 45-day general sessions, asking them who they believe are effective and ineffective lawmakers.
The Deseret News staff than uses all that information to produce the legislative report card - and name the most- and least-effective legislators.
The number of bills a lawmaker sponsors and passes is a good measuring stick of effectiveness. After all, legislators are elected to legislate - to pass, amend and repeal laws.
But that's not the whole story. Even the best of efforts and purest of intentions can fall short in the Legislature.
Take Rep. Dave Jones, D-Salt, for example. Jones, a 10-year veteran of the Legislature who represents the upper Avenues section of the city, is well thought of by fellow lawmakers. Yet Jones had just a 5-for-23 success ratio in 1995-96, a poor 22 percent.
One of Jones' failures in the 1996 session shows how tough it can be for anyone, especially a Democrat, to get a bill passed. Jones wanted to make so-called "drop-in" day-care centers be licensed by the state. A 4-year-old boy died two years ago when his parents dropped him off at a short-stay center and the boy wandered off, out the front door, and drowned in a canal.
Licensing by the state may have prevented the death, believes Jones. Jones' bill would cost $200,000. Even the GOP House caucus wanted the bill, ranking it tops on their "money" bill list. But as GOP leaders in the Senate and House had to crunch spending to accommodate Republican-sponsored bills, Jones' bill was first cut to $100,000 and then killed altogether in the Senate. Virtually every legislator could tell a similar story about a failed bill.
As you consider the Deseret News report card, please keep a couple of things in mind:
Pass/fail ratio isn't sole measure
A pass/fail ratio should not be the only measure of a legislator's impact, although it is an important factor. Legislative impact can be seen other ways as well.
- Lawmakers can amend someone else's bad bill into a good, or at least an acceptible, bill. Amendments don't show up in the report card.
- A legislator could get a bad bill killed, thus do a great service to his constituents. Likewise, such death strokes don't show up in an individual's bill pass/fail ratio.
- Some legislators sponsor a large number of bills, many of them difficult and controversial in nature. Clearly, it would be much more difficult to sponsor 30 bills and get 15 passed than sponsor five noncontroversial bills and get them all through. The first legislator would only have a 50 percent success ratio but could have a great impact on a session, while the second would have 100 percent success ratio and have accomplished little.
To be considered for inclusion in the Deseret News' report card's "most-effective" list, a legislator must have sponsored at least five bills over the past two years. For example, Rep. Dan Tuttle, D-West Valley, was two-for-two - 100 percent - but wasn't named to the "most effective" list because he didn't sponsor at least five bills.
- Most resolutions are not considered by the newspaper in the ratio. Although the trend is declining, each session some legislators sponsor resolutions - a nonbinding "sense of the Legislature" vote - on a variety of subjects, from world peace to honoring Boy Scouts. Most resolutions are unimportant but could be used to "pad" someone's success ratio. The newspaper does count resolutions that would change the Utah Constitution, since they are some of the most important pieces of legislation considered each session.
- So-called "boxcar" bills are not counted. Traditionally, before the bill-filing deadline, party leaders file boxcar bills, which have only a title, no text. The bills are then used to make last-minute changes to tax law or fund a needy project at the end of the session when normally it would take two-thirds' vote to introduce a new bill. The Deseret News report card removes "boxcar" bills from the success ratio because leaving them in would unfairly reduced sponsors' success ratio.
- Freshman legislators historically don't do well their first two years in the Legislature. The legislative process is complicated and - while it may not be for the best of reasons - the success of a legislator's bills in part depends on his personal, long-standing relationships with other lawmakers.
- Conversely, majority Republican leaders traditionally do well with their bills. Few members of their own party want to vote against the Senate president's or House speaker's bills. There are exceptions to this, however, and should a party leader do poorly in his legislation, that too, speaks to his effectiveness in running his respective bodies.
- As expected, the minority Democrats don't do as well as the majority Republicans.
This is especially evident in the Senate. Two years ago, Senate Democrats had a success ratio that was a whopping 20.7 percentage points lower than Senate Republicans. Clearly, either Democrats were sponsoring a lot of dumb bills - which is unlikely - or their bills were being killed by GOP senators or House members.
Over the past two years, Senate Democrats' bill success ratio climbed. It is now 14 percentage points lower than their majority colleagues'. That's an improvement, but there is still a real disadvantage to being a Democrat in the Senate.
Oddly enough, House Democrats don't find themselves in such a bad position. In 1993-94, House Democrats' success ration was just 1.6 percentage points under their Republican colleagues' average. Over 1995-96, House Democrats' bill success ratio was 3.1 percent lower than House Republicans'.
The perspective of others
As telling as the bill success ratio for individual lawmakers is, equally as important is what others think of the job they are doing.
In order to get candid comments about powerful, sitting legislators, the Deseret News keeps the names of those interviewed private. No lobbyist in his right mind would make a critical comment about a legislator he seeks to influence. Certainly, legislative staff members wouldn't participate in a survey if their comments about their bosses would be made public.
Some of those interviewed would list only those who they believe did a good job, declining to criticize anyone. "I don't like to see cheap shots taken, I wouldn't want to be criticized anonymously and so I can't do that, either," said one longtime House Republican interviewed for the report.
Others, however, were more than glad to point out the good and the bad in his body. "We hear only good comments about what we do (from staff and lobbyists)," said one House member. "Sometimes its good to hear what people are saying behind our backs as well."
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Here's the legislature's top performers on our dean's list.
Dave Watson, Lyle Hillyard, Al Mansell, George Mantes, Craig Peterson, Marty Stephens, Brent Goodfellow, Afton Bradshaw, Byron Harward, Shirley Jensen.