The Utah Senate defeated legislation Thursday that would have placed state lawmakers on the Utah High School Activities Association’s postseason play appeals committee.
The bill, HB265, was rejected on a 17-8 vote, after some senators questioned what expertise appointed lawmakers would bring to an appellate committee asked to review outcomes of postseason play.
Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, said it was “interesting that the party of small government is adding legislators and legislative input into every part of our sports, our schools, our everything.”
She continued, “Is this going to be beneficial to the process of adding more people to this committee, when we’ve literally tried to reduce the number of people on every other committee?”
In debate before the House Education Committee earlier in the legislative session, Marc Hunter, executive director of the Utah Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, said the organization “sees this as legislative overreach. For the life of me, I’m not understanding why.”
There is a three-member appellate system in place, he said. “Everything’s always been taken care of. There’s been nothing that’s been denied. But because of an incident last fall, now we want to have a senator and a representative from the House on this committee? My question is, if it’s not broken, what are we trying to fix?”
The genesis of the bill was an appeal related to student-athletes ineligible to participate in postseason play because they were not maintaining academic standards. The Utah High School Activities Association earlier took the position that students shouldn’t pay the price of adults deciding who can play in an athletic contest, that adults should face sanctions for those decisions.
Earlier in the session, HB265 passed unanimously in the Utah House of Representatives.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said HB265 would make the Utah High School Activities Association subject to the Government Records Access and Management Act. It is already subject to the act but debate in the Senate suggested this would be a new requirement under the legislation.