This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

To "Google" oneself is no longer just an act of vanity. In this day and age, it has become a necessary act of self-protection.

How else is one to know that, say, one has been offered a bribe by a member of the Utah Legislature?

OK, so it isn't really a bribe. It is more of a junket.

When I called him, Rep. Stephen Urquhart quickly backed off any suggestion that his invitation for the members of The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board to visit St. George and environs included an offer to pick up the tab.

To a legislator, that's an acceptable method of gathering information. To a journalist, it's a bribe.

And, OK, I didn't find Urquhart's blogged invitation with any search engine. It was alertly included in the Utah Policy Web site run by lobbyist LaVarr Webb [http://www.utah policy.com/], as a link to Urquhart's blog [http://steveu.com/blog/].

That's the form. Here's the substance.

Our editorial position on the Washington County Growth and Conservation Act, submitted by Sen. Bob Bennett and Rep. Jim Matheson, has been critical. The legislation strikes us not as the planning instrument it is represented as by its backers, but a pre-determined assumption that the rapidly growing community of St. George needs to 1) grow, 2) grow faster, 3) grow on land now owned by the federal government, and 4) grow with water that may or may not, or should or should not, be piped in from unpredictable Lake Powell.

These are assumptions that should come at the end of a planning process, if ever, not at the beginning. Otherwise, it's not a plan, it's a fix.

But Urquhart, who represents St. George in the Utah House, is in the camp of those who view the bill as the starting point for what's being presumptuously called Envision Dixie, a rip-off of the nationally recognized Envision Utah process that has done so much to help the Wasatch Front cities absorb, if not exactly manage, their rapid growth.

Urquhart objects to our editorial portrayal of St. George as, "a giant strip mall punctuated by water-guzzling golf courses." He suggests that we wouldn't think that if we'd seen St. George. So he blogs:

So, I invite the members of the Trib's editorial board to come down to St. George. Seriously. I am happy to arrange lodging and meals and put together an itinerary of some places that I think few spots on earth could rival. It sounds like I better leave off the golf, but that's fine. There are plenty of other things to do.

We aren't ready to decide if we want to take Rep. Urquhart up on his generous and unquestionably sincere offer to arrange - at The Tribune's expense, we now agree - such a visit. Though we would take this opportunity to say that we have all been to St. George, some of us quite frequently.

We know that it is growing like kudzu for reasons that are quite understandable. It's warm all year long. There's lots of good places to play golf and it is close to Las Vegas. Urquhart moves from those facts to this conclusion:

It is na ve to suggest that growth in such a desirable community could just be stopped. Were it to be stopped, housing prices likely would race even further through the roof - chasing off any and all non-wealthy citizens. . . . A plan is needed to address these complexities. Remember: failing to plan is planning to fail.

Our response, admittedly drawn before whatever fact-finding trip might prove to be in order, is that stopping, or even seriously slowing, development in St. George would not be the result of a decision made by Congress or any other human authority.

Such a halt would be a result of the collision of human desires with Nature's limits, limits that will only guffaw at we puny humans' efforts to get around them with expensive and damaging pipelines that may soon dry up at both ends.

We appreciate Urquhart's offer to discuss this matter further, here, there or on the Internet. But, for the moment, we remain convinced that a bill that contemplates selling 25,000 acres of public land to private developers in such a rapidly growing desert area does not constitute a plan. It begs for one.

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George Pyle is a Tribune editorial writer who hosts the editorial board's blog, Plato's Cave, at

http://blogs.sltrib.com/ editorial/.