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John Daley Reporting Utah has long been one of the holdouts where lawmakers met on the Martin Luther King holiday, but now top leaders have agreed to ask voters to change the start date.
There's been a community campaign to get this changed. There was new legislation this year from Democrat Ralph Becker. And the story recently made national headlines.
The state Constitution says the Legislature must gather on the third Monday of January, which of course is also the day set aside to honor Dr. King. For many years, lawmakers resisted changing that, saying they were celebrating the civil rights leader by working that day. Community leaders have stepped up efforts through meetings, letters, emails and phone calls to change it.
Today, a bi-partisan group of legislative leaders announced they'd agreed to try to put on the ballot the question of whether or not the legislative start date be pushed back a day.
John Valentine (R), Senate President: "it's not been an issue that's really been an issue that our state has had a lot of real concern over. We never were a slave state, we never were a state that had segregation, but instead we were a state that has honored freedom and the fighters of freedom."
Edward Lewis, Jr., NAACP Tri-State Conference President: "so now this is one issue that the state won't have to bear and we can move forward. And they have become much more mainstream with the country. It's a federal holiday."
Today's move comes just two weeks after a story on Utah lawmakers meeting on MLK Day filed by a local Associated Press reporter got picked up by many national news organizations. We did a google search and found CBS, ABC, the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Sun Times all ran the stories.
The legislature as a whole will soon vote on the measure. If it passes, it could be on the ballot in November of 2008.
More coming up, including a look back at the history of this issue, at 6:00.
