The Utah Legislature's "road show" is folding its tent for at least a year and maybe longer.
Legislative leaders have decided not to take an official tour of an area of the state with the whole 104-member body this summer.
Instead, there will be no interim study committee meetings of lawmakers in August, and any of the nine joint budget committees may make one- or two-day site visits that month if committee members feel such a trip may help them better understand state government, said House Speaker Marty Stephens, R-Farr West.
The full-blown summer tour has been a staple of legislative activity for nearly a decade.
Each August or September, legislators would go out en masse to visit a different geographical part of the state and hold two or more town meetings with residents. While lawmakers almost to a person extolled the visits — and local residents clearly liked them as well — the trips were not without controversy.
Early on, legislators were feted by lobbyists — tickets offered to the Shakespearean Festival while in Cedar City, dinners purchased in Logan, golfing in southern Utah. On later tours, local businesses picked up some extraneous costs.
When legislative leaders decided to hold a town meeting in the Logan Tabernacle during a 1994 trip, protesters gathered outside the event, citing concerns over separation of church and state. Local TV stations carried the meeting live.
And senators representing eastern Utah were criticized two years ago for sending out a fund-raising letter (a mistake, they later admitted) asking lobbyists for thousands of dollars to help pay for that summer's trip.
Familiarity can breed disinterest, too.
In the early years, TV stations routinely covered the events and newspaper reporters camped out with legislators as they visited local businesses, ate barbecue with residents and rode horses through state parks.
But during last summer's visit to Carbon and Emery counties, the Deseret News was the only statewide media outlet to cover the two-day event. Even when legislators visited Summit, Wasatch and Morgan counties two summers ago, it drew little interest from Wasatch Front reporters headquartered just over the Wasatch mountain range 40 minutes away.
Stephens said lack of coverage and publicity had nothing to do with the tour's hiatus. Rather, it's a been-there-done-that feeling.
The only counties not officially visited on the tour are Salt Lake, Davis, Utah, Weber and Tooele. Eighty percent of the legislators live in those counties and generally know what is going on there, he said.
Legislators could have started over again with trips to St. George and Cedar City, where they started in 1993. Only 28 lawmakers of 104 from the 1993-94 Legislature are still in office. But this year, leaders decided to try a different tack in educating the part-time legislators about needs around the state.
"We may go out again next year or the year after," Stephens said.
House Minority Whip Patrice Arent, D-South Cottonwood, said Democrats see nothing sinister in the change. True, nearly all of the Democratic lawmakers are from Salt Lake, Weber and Tooele counties and so won't get the opportunity to organize a tour or show off their areas to the GOP-dominated Legislature. But Arent said it makes sense to look at a different way of doing things.
The tour did provide another service, however. It was a time for legislators and their spouses to get to know their colleagues in a relaxed, out-of-the-Capitol atmosphere. And that, in turn, could lead to less personal animosity during difficult, sometimes partisan, fights while in session.
But for now, the road show is over.
E-MAIL: bbjr@desnews.com