This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah legislators pimping their personal agendas appear to be getting more adept at using (abusing) their professional staffs to produce data that supposedly justify their political initiatives. Take the recent trek into Fantasyland by Senate Majority Leader Curtis Bramble, who waved numbers from the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office to back his claim that the private school voucher bill would save Utah $1.4 billion over 13 years.
Alas, the only problem is that it's not true.
Nevertheless, this "fact" has been oft-repeated by Bramble and other pro-voucher legislators, and it was included in a promotional film produced by the Informed Voter Project, a committee formed - and misnamed - by those same lawmakers.
Critics contend the committee's claim of dizzying voucher savings is a gross misrepresentation, a result of Bramble's manipulation of the Legislature's professional staff. Not surprisingly, Bramble was reluctant to share the research supporting the conclusion. That is, until he learned that the anti-voucher side had released other research from the same Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office showing that vouchers would actually cost the state millions of dollars.
Once Bramble caved and released his data, the picture cleared. It showed that he had asked the analysts for a calculation based on what all students eligible for vouchers would cost the state if every one of them were in the public system. That includes all the students already in private schools and those potentially moving into the state.
In other words, it was a house of cards. But structural deficiency is not part of the message being trumpeted by lawmakers trying to persuade voters to approve vouchers in next month's ballot referendum on the law they passed last winter.
This tactic is similar to one employed by Bramble last year, just before the legislative session in January, when he tried to discredit teacher groups which maintain that Utah educators are woefully underpaid. Bramble touted a Legislative Fiscal Analyst's study showing that Utah was first among the Mountain States in teacher compensation based on salaries and benefits.
That astounding ranking certainly was news to the hundreds of Utah-trained teachers who have decamped to surrounding states, which pay them much more to teach fewer students.
What Bramble didn't bother to tell anyone was that his who'd-a-thunk-it pronouncement was based on a six-year-old study that included a bunch of incidentals in Utah teacher contracts that look good on paper but don't make up for salary deficiencies. Comparative studies of teacher pay provided by the State Office of Education ranked Utah sixth out of the eight Mountain States.
All this Capitol Hill sleight-of-hand isn't really the fault of the Legislature's fiscal analyst, nor are the professionals who work in that office prone to deception. Their job is to analyze specific questions posed by legislators, who can get the answer they want to hear by the way they word the question.
Lawmakers perfected this technique by figuring out how to manipulate fiscal notes - attachments to bills from the Fiscal Analyst's Office that estimate how much money implementation of the legislation would cost the state.
A few years ago, rural lawmakers pushing a bill to prohibit the sale of any Utah land to the federal government without legislative approval were upset when the analyst's office factored in the cost of defending potential lawsuits. The following year, the bill was reintroduced with no mention of possible litigation.
Another example from a few years ago: Lawmakers approved a sales-tax exemption for manufacturing companies that their experts said would cost $31 million in lost revenues. It actually cost $80 million, forcing legislators into a special session to fix their fiscal fantasy.