With the end of this year’s legislative session on the horizon, Utah lawmakers are working through a record number of bills — and taking a step they hope may curb the flow in future years.
This comes after a November meeting during which legislative leaders discussed the problem of the increasing amount of bill requests. Members of the House said then that an anonymous senator had opened a whopping 83 bill files, and Rep. Francis Gibson, R-Mapleton, called the lack of self-restraint “ridiculous.”
In response to complaints about the mystery senator and others, Rep. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, introduced HJR13, a rule that would require publicly disclosing the number of bill files opened by every lawmaker — an attempt to prod legislators to check themselves through a kind of public shaming.