The State Records Committee meets 9 a.m. Dec. 11. For a complete agenda, click here.

Here's a synopsis with instructions on how to attend or submit written comment.

— NC

The meeting will be held 9 a.m. in the Courtyard Meeting Room, the Archives Building, 346 S. Rio Grande St. (450 West), Salt Lake City, Utah, This is a public meeting, and anyone can attend.

* 9:00 a.m. – Hearing – Utah Federal Defender Office vs. Utah Attorney General’s Office, Capital Habeas Unit. The Federal Defender Office is appealing the denial of communications between the Utah Division of Finance and the Utah Attorney General’s Office, Division of Criminal Appeals.

* Training for State Records Committee members: 11:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

* Approval of the November 13, 2008, meeting minutes of the State Records Committee

* Appeals received: A summary of cases reviewed for hearings

* Cases in District Court

* Citizen representative update

* Approval of Retention Schedule Items

* Other Business

* Adjournment – Next meeting scheduled – Jan. 8.

Individuals wishing to comment during the meeting should notify Susan Mumford, Executive Secretary of the State Records Committee, and should be in attendance at the public meeting. The executive secretary will also accept written comments before the meeting but no later than 6 p.m. Dec. 9. Please mail or deliver those comments to:

State Records Committee
Utah State Archives
346 S. Rio Grande
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101

NOTICE OF POSSIBLE ELECTRONIC OR TELEPHONIC PARTICIPATION
One or more members of the State Records Committee may participate electronically or telephonically pursuant to UCA 52-4-7.8.

NOTICE OF SPECIAL ACCOMMODATION DURING PUBLIC MEETINGS
In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, individuals needing special accommodations (including auxiliary communicative aids and services) during this meeting should notify Susan Mumford at the Utah State Archives: 801-531-3861.

Labels: State Records Committee

If you're a regular reader of this blog — And judging by the Web traffic, you're not. — you may remember this post from June.

The subject of that wayward Freedom of Information Act request was Bruce "Utah" Phillips. The FBI originally told me it did not have any files on Phillips at its Salt Lake City field office.

Then a couple weeks ago, a package from FBI record keepers in Virginia arrives on my desk. A file discussing Phillips was inside.

I called the FBI's FOIA hotline to ask why I received the earlier letter telling me nothing existed. A helpful gentleman at the hotline told me he did not know why the earlier letter was sent, but — hypothetically — the FBI may not have had a file on Phillips himself but did find references to Phillips in a different file.

That makes me want to request the entire file, a piece of which is found below.

— NC


PhillipsFBI.pdf

Labels: FBI, FOIA

Election-related documents usually include voter registration cards, voter rolls and records of campaign contributions.

I never thought a police report would be related to an election. But that's life in American politics.

The report below is from the Uintah County Sheriff's Office. It discusses one episode in the investigation into the 2006 Daggett County Sheriff's Election.

— NC

UintahSheriffreport.pdf

Labels: Candidates, Police

I must have big fans on the north end of the Wasatch Front because the Standard-Examiner has weighed upon the survey I discussed yesterday.

In an editorial, the Ogden-based newspaper opines:

In Utah, our government is ailing, and it needs a large dose of integrity....

The editorial recommends following BGA's suggestions for improving government.

— NC

Labels: Open and Public Meetings Act, open records

The Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office logs millions of dollars in overtime each year to operate its 2,000-bed Adult Detention Center -- an expense that has tripled during the past five years.

Democratic Sheriff Jim Winder defends those hours as necessary for keeping the county jail secure while staffing levels are down. And the County Council seems to agree.

But that’s a policy decision. The issue, in this context, is how to demonstrate through public records that a rise in overtime hours really has occurred.

Here’s how we did it: We pulled numbers from the county’s end-of-year budget reports that include detailed data on the number of allocated positions within the jail, the number of vacancies (as of December) and the amount of money spent in overtime.

The one-stop shop for those numbers would be the Auditor’s Office, even though we directed our inquiry to the county’s human-resources division and the Mayor’s Office.

What we found is that the jail’s overtime hours ballooned from $1.1 million in 2003 to $3.2 million last year. Meanwhile, the number of jail vacancies rose from 22 positions to 71. Only recently did those numbers diverge: the number of empty jail jobs declined in 2008, but OT hours are expected to remain steady at $3.1 million.

Interesting? We thought so.

The sheriff told the County Council this week that his overtime expenses really are reasonable. As proof, he demonstrated through a slide show that the jail’s salaries have increased about 5 percent annually -- about the same as corrections’ overall expenditures.

By the way, that slide show is a public document, too. We got it.

-- JS

The alternative title of this post is: "Utah: It's just like New York."



The Better Government Association recently released a ranking of how states score in protecting "itself against possible corruption and [making] its processes open and accountable to it citizens." The BGA ranking index considers the state's laws on transparency, keeping public officials accountable and placing limits on items like campaign contributions and gifts to public officials.

To read the entire report, click here then choose your preferred format.

Utah was ranked 36 overall, which tied it with New York. Utah was tied for third in open records laws, but the state's standing deteriorates from there.

The Beehive State was ranked 9th in protecting whistle blowers. Utah is 39th in campaign finance laws. (Insert your "Utah politics needs ethics reform" mantra here.)

Utah is No. 32 in open meetings laws and No. 47 in conflicts of interest laws.

— NC

Labels: Open and Public Meetings Act, open records, State Records Committee

Curious about the kooky calls phoned into the Salt Lake County Mayor’s Office? We certainly were.

The state’s most-populous county maintains a publicly accessible database that logs thousands of constituent complaints and calls for service dialed into the Mayor’s Office.

Although the reports read much like a police blotter -- snowplow tears up parking strip, traffic signal not working, ducklings trapped beneath a storm drain -- they provide enough detail to dig up sometimes-laughable case files about the phone calls that frequent the county’s highest office.

You’ll read about pink fire hydrants, mattresses flopping in the road at midnight and a woman who wants the county to trim her apple trees.

The information is accessible under the Government Records Access and Management Act to anyone who wants it. And it won’t take long to compile. We requested a 10-month report listing thousands of phone calls. It took less than two minutes for the Mayor’ Office to generate the spreadsheet and ship it to us via e-mail.

-- JS