How to Keep Tabs on the Man 

Any biped with Google and a Steno pad can call him/herself a journalist. Take the better part of the reportorial staffs at The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News—please.

A muckraker, on the other hand, is that rare journalist, gadfly, activist or social critic who values unadulterated, truth-dripping evidence over the artful quotation of a dubious source—an executive, politician, lawyer, bureaucrat, cop, crackhead, dweeb, wasteoid, or the like. This guide aims to aid fellow malcontents in finding that evidence, and coaxing it away from those disinclined to let it go.

By necessity, this project is a work in progress that will be updated here as new resources and tricks of the trade become known to the paper (send us your suggestions). What follows then is a tutorial of sorts, with a roadmap to resources that will assist anyone with the time and inclination to do this job better than we can.

All of the resources presented here offer you a handy arsenal for tracking down fat cats, sniffing out corruption and otherwise raking the muck. But any one of these resources on its own is limited in what it can tell you. That’s why the art of muckraking at its finest is one of cross-referencing.

Find a politician. See if he or she has a business. Does that business bid on state work? Does that business donate to other politicians’ campaigns? Is that business up to its ass in lawsuits? If so, is it also making campaign donations to politicians to try and do something about it or as they like to call it “being good corporate citizens”?

As an example, we’ll be using the different resources presented here to check in on Utah Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, slated to be Utah’s next governor, to see how one name can pop up in all sorts of fun places.

Now, on to the tricks of the muckraking trade.

Hiring a nanny? Going into business with your buddy from the ward? Looking for a contractor to knock out a wall without knocking down your house? Want to avoid voting for a douchebag this time? Curious where your stalker gets all his sweet intel? You don’t need a private detective; you just need a nudge in the right direction. “Everyone goes through life dropping crumbs,” the inimitable detective Darryl Zero remarked in 1998’s Zero Effect. “If you can recognize the crumbs, you can trace a path all the way back from your death certificate to the dinner and a movie that resulted in you in the first place.” In this age of Total Information Awareness, all the crumbs are now swept up, digitized and cataloged for mass consumption.

Name, Rank & Serial Number
• A number of people finders, used in concert, can help you zero in on your subject. Skipease.com is a comprehensive starting place, which can be complemented by ZabaSearch.com, PrivateEye.com, AnyWho.com and Whitepages.com. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but beware that most are gateways to pay sites that may provide additional useful information but also want to scam you.

WhoIs.net: Identifies who owns a Website. Also, to find out who owns Internet domain names, check with DomainName.com.

Social Security Death Index: Searches millions of records by name through Ancestry.com.

Social Networking Websites
An obvious resource with details about where people live, work and go to school, what they’re doing from moment to moment, who they’re doing it with, and who they’re doing it with. Some careless souls even post their personal contact info and brag about the crimes they commit. Politicians are using these sites to attract supporters and even unwittingly announce their campaigns for U.S. Senate, a la Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. The personal comments, photos and videos people share with the world on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter will come back to haunt them; we will make sure of that.

County Clerks
Repositories of voter registration data (address, age, political affiliation) and marriage licenses (maiden name, witness(es), religious affiliation), which are public records but not available online. You can contact the recorder’s office to request government records from clerks in any Utah county. A few online links include:

Salt Lake County Clerk
Utah County Clerk
Davis County Clerk
Weber County Clerk
Washington County Clerk

Muckraking Gary Herbert By Eric S. Peterson epeterson@cityweekly.net Public records reveal a lot. There might not be a public record of how many dead hookers a politician keeps in his trunk—but utilizing City Weekly’s muckraker guide, there is much to uncover. That’s why we’re casting our muckraking light on our soon-to-be governor, 62-year-old Gary R. Herbert, who—prior to Jon Huntsman Jr.’s surprise ambassadorship appointment—was known mostly as Gary Who? Let’s first try court records. We know Herbert’s a Utah County man, so by running his name through the 4th District Court in Utah County, we come upon a few run-of-the-mill speeding and parking violations in Herbert’s name as well as a more interesting string of delinquent state tax notices, the earliest from ’94 for $288. An amount that small could simply be a rounding error for a well-heeled realtor, but then again, the 2004 tax notice was a little higher at $2,199. That same year, Herbert also got dinged for operating a business without a license. Running a business search on Herbert, we see he is a registered principal in about a half-dozen businesses, most now expired and most tied to real estate in Utah County—attesting to his 20-some years as a realtor and as former head of the Utah Association of Realtors. Going to the campaign records means checking Herbert’s candidate report from 2004. It provides more insight about the base he was cultivating when he initially ran against Huntsman for governor before joining Huntsman’s ticket. In 2004, Herbert raised and spent exactly $319,068.34. Herbert likes to keep his workers in the family—evidenced here by his giving a combined $947 to wife Jeanette as “reimbursement.” Or, check out son Nathan Herbert, who received more than $12,500 from father Gary for campaign work. A look at Gary Herbert’s donors shows some serious love coming from the Utah Association of Realtors, the group for which he served as president in 1989: That organization coughed up $30,000. But most interesting is the financial love Herbert gave to himself—$129,847 he received from his election PAC, Vision 2004. What’s curious here is what the records don’t show. Because, in looking up donors and organizing documents for the Vision 2004 PAC on the Elections Website (which Herbert, as lieutenant governor, oversees), no records appear for Vision 2004 anywhere. Vision 2004 may not show up, but in contacting the state’s Elections division, we are told it is because Vision 2004 was taken over by the aptly named FOGPAC (Friends of Gary Herbert, PAC) in 2007. Why the PAC name change? It’s a good question, one with many a plausible explanation. But whatever the reason, it’s clear that making the vision more “FOGgy” also makes it more difficult to rake Vision 2004’s muck. Knowing about the name change, however, we can look up FOGPAC’s donations and see that in 2003, the Phoenix-based Apollo Group was the PAC’s biggest donor at $80,000. Apollo Group is the publicly traded company that operates the University of Phoenix. Interestingly, the university’s CEO at the time (he’s since left the company), Todd S. Nelson, gave another $20,000 So, a third of Herbert’s war chest in 2004 came via one interest: the University of Phoenix. That friendly relationship may have started back in 1999 when then-Utah County Commissioner Herbert agreed to reimburse county employees for taking non-career essential classes (like Algebra 1) at institutions like the University of Phoenix. We found the minutes from the meeting where Herbert voted for the reimbursements via a Google search . Oh, the fun you can have reading public documents. But you don’t have to take our word for it.

Property Records
Since Utah is a nondisclosure state, information on the actual sales price of real estate is not available to the public. Still, the chain of ownership can be tracked through the county assessor’s office, which records documents of current ownership, ownership history, property tax valuations, bank notes, liens, etc. Remember, not all counties have land records online, but here are some that do:

Utah County
• Davis County
• Weber County
• Washington County
• Salt Lake County

Through the assessor’s office you can do current property searches, but to get historic ownership details and other information in Salt Lake County, you’ll have to walk on down to the Salt Lake County Recorder’s Office at 2001 S. State. You can search by address, owner or parcel number:

Owner history/tax info: Will list address, current owners, and assessed property values going back five years.

Abstract: Shows the property’s chain of ownership. Fear not the jargony code you see on the screen! Grantor/grantee—in simplified terms means the giver and the taker, or which party is acting upon another.

Parcel Map: These may be a tough read, but if you visit your county recorder’s office in person, ask for the clerk’s help in situating the map with more recognizable landmarks like the Great Salt Lake or Interstate 15.

Google Maps
• Maps.Google.com/help/maps/streetview: The street view feature provides a 360-degree photo-view at the street level for almost any address entered. You can see what someone’s house looks like and even what kind of car they drive if it was parked in the driveway when the photo was taken.

Behold the seedy underbelly of your community! The following links will better acquaint you with cops, courts, criminals and the lying liars (lawyers) who keep them all in business:

Utah State Courts
The Utah State Courts system includes two appellate courts: the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. The state’s trial courts are made up of District, Juvenile, and Justice courts for each of Utah’s eight judicial districts.

Salt Lake, Tooele and Summit counties make up the Third District Court. In the Salt Lake Valley, cases are adjudicated downtown at the Matheson Courthouse, 450 S. State, or in the ’burbs at 8080 S. Redwood Road. At these locations, you can view virtually any case file, sit in on criminal or civil hearings and trials or troll for future ex-spouses.

UtCourts.gov contains tons of information, most notably the searchable full-text opinions from the Utah Court of Appeals and Utah Supreme Court.

Court records: Civil and criminal case files are generally available for inspection at no cost in person at each court location, but copies will run you $.25 per page.

XChange

Federal Court
The Frank E. Moss U.S. Courthouse at 350 S. Main in downtown Salt Lake City houses all federal district court records. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court, an adjunct to the district court, is located on the third floor, while a law library with more than 15,000 volumes is on the second floor. Federal cases often have to do with bankruptcy, civil rights, labor law as well as criminal law.

Dockets and pleadings for civil cases filed after July 1989 and for criminal cases since November 1992 may be viewed in the clerk’s office or on a Website called “PACER”. Searches on the PACER site cost $.08 per page accessed.

Know the law
• Municipal Ordinances: Most cities have an online codebook viewer allowing the muckraker the opportunity to read the letter of the law in different cities for themselves. Below, you’ll find links for:

Salt Lake City
South Salt Lake
West Jordan
West Valley City
Taylorsville
Midvale
Murray
Draper
Riverton
Bountiful
Layton
Ogden
Provo
Logan
Park City
St. George

Utah Code covers it all, from liquor laws to cemeteries to dogs to mining regulations. It’s all here, plus you can search by keyword.

Police Departments
Every police department in the state has a Website, and most of them suck rocks. Initial contact reports, which are those documenting police actions upon arrival to a call for service, are “normally public.” Follow-up or investigative reports are generally not public. Many police departments, however, assert that you must be somehow involved in the case in order to receive any associated police reports. They are wrong. We’ve encountered this misunderstanding repeatedly at police departments across the county and state and, without fail, we manage to educate—and often re-educate—these law enforcement agencies as to the correct interpretation of the state’s open-record laws.

Jail and Prison
The place to really check up on your neighbor:

Looking for an offender currently under the jurisdiction of the Utah Department of Corrections (i.e., in prison or on parole)? You can find them here by name.

Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office: Search the jail’s current inmate population or history. Requests for police reports, mug shots and arrest records must be made via mail or in person.

• CrimeReports.com Nationwide crime reporting and mapping system, including sex offender mapping. Supplement with SpotCrime.com, Similar to CrimeReports.com, but with less quantitative data and more qualitative detail for each crime reported.

Utah Sex Offender Registry: Search by name or location, or browse the entire list.

National Sex Offender Search: Search by name or location.

Legal Resources
• Utah Bar: The place to look for everything from legal opinions to disciplinary records. Includes a searchable member directory and the Bar Journal that lists public disciplinary actions against attorneys—among myriad other features.

American Civil Liberties Union of Utah: A storehouse of information when it comes to local violations of civil liberties and civil rights, but sometimes reluctant to part with the intel.

Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: As the name implies. If you become a member, you can access lots of great links and information.

Utah Statewide Association of Prosecutors: Included here for parity, but they have no Website and probably wouldn’t talk to you anyway.

Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice

Most muckrakers hot on the trail know to follow the money. But, before they do that, they start with the basics: Are these people who they claim to be?

Business & Professional Licensing
How much do you really know about your massage therapist? Has your dentist been disciplined for sucking down nitrous oxide? Does your “general” contractor have the license to back up his hourly rate? Inquiring muckraker minds want to know. The state’s Department of Commerce site is a good place to start.

Check out Occupational & Professional Licensing with info on 60 categories of licenses. Here you can search by name for individuals and companies licensed in dozens of regulated professions, or review disciplinary actions and citations.

The Utah Division of Real Estate regulates appraisers, residential mortgage lenders, real estate brokers and agents; and salespeople for subdivisions, timeshares, and camp resorts. It publishes newsletters with licensing actions and disciplinary sanctions at RealEstate.utah.gov/newsletters.

• Better Business Bureau of Utah: Its Website allows you to check out complaints filed against a business or charity.

Division of Corporations & Commercial Code
This is where Utah businesses keep and file their basic records and where private business makes it all public.

Corporations.utah.gov : Where the colonoscopy of any Utah company should begin.

Utah’s Department of Commerce’s Business Entity Search will return a registered agent, the date the business name was registered, and the date the registration was renewed or expired.

Commerce’s Registered Principals Search will yield registered principals (officers and owners) for a particular business for $1 through a link on the business-entity registration detail. To search for all businesses for which a particular person is a registered principal, a $3 search is required.

The Uniform Commercial Code governs commercial transactions and provides a centralized place for creditors to stake their claim to collateral posted by a debtor. Though the monetary amounts of the loans involved are not disclosed, the frequency and timing of the filings can be indicative of a flailing concern, and a forecast of the eventual new owner if and when the business tanks.

The state’s Division of Securities regulates securities and maintains an enforcement and civil-actions database. The press release archive is a scrollable rogue’s gallery of white-collar weasels.

The Utah Insurance Department regulates insurance companies; the good stuff is in the fraud division.

Edgar houses federal Securities & Exchange Commission filings for publicly traded companies.

Public Utilities
• The state’s Division of Public Utilities lists contact information for all of Utah’s electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water and sewer utilities as well as railroad companies. The site also has a tab for the Public Service Commission of Utah where you can see who the utility kingpins are and check out the commission’s pending business, complaints and proposed rate hikes.

Nonprofits
Not all nonprofits are save-the-fair-trade-babies groups, run by work-for-nothing idealists who come to work in cutoff shorts with hemp briefcases. In fact, some of Utah’s biggest nonprofits are nonprofit in name only. Your key to learning more about nonprofits is a magical IRS tax document called the 990.

• Where to look up the 990
The 990 tax form is required of every 501(c)(3) nonprofit that takes in more than $25,000 a year. A good database for looking up these forms can be found at Guidestar or Foundation Center and look under “Fund Finders.”

• Total Revenue? See Part I Line 12
This line tells you about the scope of the organization’s operations: how much dough they bring in from revenue, expenses and net assets.

• Who are the board members? How much are they getting paid? See Part V-A
Comparing revenue and board member compensation can make for some interesting math. Like when City Weekly reporter Stephen Dark questioned in an August 2008 story the Salt Lake City Leonardo finances. From the center’s 2007 990, Dark noted that its top three board members were being paid a combined $231,989, while the center’s revenues for the same year were only $225,596. Unfortunately, Part V-A of the 990 will only list the top five highest paid board members or employees.

• Organization overhead? See Part I Lines 13-17
This section breaks down the nonprofit’s overhead costs between program services, fund-raising and management expenses. Here is where you can check to see if the org is actually funding its programs or just spending money on white-glove charity auctions.

• The Utah NonProfit Association
The UNPA is also a good resource for checking the standing of nonprofits in the state. It also has a member listing you can use to find local nonprofit’s Websites.

• Charitable Solications Permit
Where to check to make sure a nonprofit has its charitable solicitations permit which allows them to legally accept donations.

• GRAMA—wield it like an ax: Utah has one of the most liberal public records laws in all the land, the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA). The voluminous act has one simple premise: “all records are public unless otherwise expressly provided by statute.” This means citizens can request records from all levels of city, county and state government.

City Weekly banks on GRAMA for access to police reports, disciplinary files of public employees and regulated professionals, campaign finance records, voter registrations, lobbyist disclosures, payouts from government risk funds, mug shots, booking information, civil and criminal court dockets and case files, mayors’ e-mails, property records, voter information, marriage licenses, audits of government agencies, business registrations, articles of incorporation, debts incurred by businesses, bids for government contracts, water quality reports, parking meter revenue, justice court revenue from fines and forfeitures, and an ass-load of other stuff.

The act also enumerates exceptions to disclosure and lays out the appeals process for when a request is denied. Although a thorough understanding of the act is advisable, by visiting the links below, you can find out about records that must be disclosed and those that may be properly withheld; your right to inspect records free of charge and receive copies of records for a reasonable fee; legitimate reasons that your request may be denied; and how to navigate the multi-layered appeals process when your request was denied illegitimately here:

63G-2-401: Appeal to head of governmental entity. 
63G-2-402: Option for appealing a denial.
63G-2-403: Appeals to the records committee. 

The Student Press Law Center offers a handy fill-in-the-blanks GRAMA request letter. Tragically, this tool hasn’t been updated along with Utah law, so where the automatically generated letter reads “Pursuant to … Utah Code Ann. secs. 63-2-101 to 63-2-1001,” you’ll need to cut and paste it into a text editor to revise the code sections to read, “63G-2-101 to 63G-2-1001.” Some government agencies will accept this letter, while others require that you fill out their own “special” request form.

FOIA—Probing the Fed’s Bowels: Retrieving records from the federal government can often seem like a time-intensive exercise in futility. But if you’re patient and clever, you can get results through the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA . Many agency Websites detail what type of information is routinely available without a FOIA, but if it’s not listed, then call your elected officials’ offices in D.C. to get clues as to where you might begin searching. One Website geared toward reporters that provides all the ins and outs of FOIA, including FOIA request letters, is The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Federal Open Government Guide.

City and County Library Systems: Public library systems subscribe to proprietary data sources that most cannot afford. Many are available via remote access from your home computer using your library card number as the login. Others are only available at the library. Check out the Salt Lake City library’s Online Research Center, and Salt Lake County library’s Online Databases, both of which require a library card for full functionality. Perhaps the most valuable resource to this end is the proxy access to the newspaper archive Newsbank that retrieves stories that you might otherwise have to pay for by going directly to the paper’s archives.

Never forget that a politician is also a public servant—which means they serve you. You are the boss. Your tax dollars fund them, and your vote keeps them in office. The least they can do is keep up their books. With the high cost of campaigns, candidates need money, and that means they need donors. Lucky for the muckraker, there’s a record of all this give and take. In addition to donations, don’t forget expenditure reports, where you can see if the candidate is paying his brother for “campaign work.”

Campaign Finance Reports
• Elections.utah.gov: The state’s new database for election financial reports from 2008 and beyond (for older records, click here) allows you to break out campaign donations and expenditures by candidate, corporation, political action committee, political issues committee or by party.

Follow the “advanced search” link onto the “Extract” option. This search allows you to download an excel file on any candidate. Leave the search field blank to download an excel file for all political candidates for that year and all their contributions and contributors. Now you have a master document of where all the money went to in every race in a single year.

FollowTheMoney.org: Another site dedicated to state politics that is helpful for tracking campaign cash. The site takes a more macro look at everything but does have a district finder. Just enter your address and the site provides candidate campaign finance data for almost all your elected officials.

OpenSecrets.org: Similar to follow the money, except this site is dedicated to federal races.

E-mails
As long as any elected official (except state legislators) writes a work or public-policy e-mail, you can GRAMA the hell out it … and learn some pretty interesting things. Why not try to GRAMA private tweets on Twitter while you’re at it? Through his own ineptness, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff recently proved that Twitter is being used for private conversations between public officials.

Delving into the Legislature
The Utah Legislature’s site, while a bit cumbersome, does offer a bounty for the determined muckraker. Legislative voting histories, audio files of debates and committee discussions and much more await.

Floor debates: Listen to audio files of House and Senate floor debates. You can search by the date or by the bill.

Committee discussions: By following the “Committees” link, you can find a list of all legislative committees and access committee documents, minutes and archived audio recording.

Conflict of interest forms: Every legislator is required to document possible conflicts that might dovetail with his or her 9-to-5 and/or family connections. By rolling over the “House” link on the left side of the home page, a menu will lead you to the COI forms. For the senate forms, you have to can find it here

Audits: Follow the “Publications” link to a listing of all legislative audits for a certain year. They usually come with a short summary as well as a link to the full report. Audits generally are like state investigations into whether or not a state program is working. Don’t forget, you can also GRAMA the notes to any audit, and find out what made it into the final report and what did not.

Government Agencies
The onion layers of state bureaucracy are many in Utah—with dozens of agencies from liquor control to real estate. With some guidance, though, navigating these layers of red tape hopefully shouldn’t make you cry.

Utah.gov: Invaluable Web portal to state government, ranked consistently among the best in the nation.

Agency list: The master list for all government agencies in the state. Click on the telephone and e-mail directory for a search option to find the contact info for any state employee.

Transparent.utah.gov: This site purports to list millions of state government expenditures, from giant public works contracts down to the state’s paper-clip vendor. Time will tell if it lives up to the billing.

State Construction Registry: Here you can find a searchable database for Utah construction projects, and who is building them (click on the “Public Search Functionality” link). Details on projects will set you back a $1. Cross-reference the names of those who won the bids on government building projects with those who donate to lawmakers’ campaign coffers.

Public employee salaries: UtahsRight.com is the single most valuable and altruistic contribution by one press outlet in this state to its competition and the public. The Salt Lake Tribune’s admirable effort to capture salary data for every government employee in the state remains a tad slow and clunky, but the data is there in spades. You can search by individual or by departments, schools and universities to see who’s making the most bling.

Risk fund and government employee discipline records: Now that you know how to find the agencies, try shining your GRAMA light on them. Requesting risk fund documents will provide you with record of payments that government agencies made as legal settlements. Basically, risk funds exist to cover expenses for government boo-boos. The other “Aha!” records always worth requesting are disciplinary. Did a cop use a little too much force? Did some employee “mismanage” some state funds, and get reprimanded for it? Request these documents to find out.

State Auditor: The state auditor’s office is a good place to look up state investigations into the behavior of local agencies. If you search for audits from all years, you’ll find more juicy documents than if you search by a specific year.

General Resources
• Reporter’s Desktop: A launching pad for budding journalists; though a bit dated, it combines some basics in one place.

Altweeklies.com: Because CW can’t save the world alone. Also check out Alternet, ProPublica and Voice of San Diego for examples of kick-‘em-in-the-teeth-when-they-deserve-it journalism.

Well, there you have it, folks, some great tools for raking the muck, getting the goods and finding out who’s in bed with whom. Check back for updates and new tips. And send us your tips and resources, too, and we’ll post them here. And maybe even your success stories. Happy hunting.

Shane Johnson is a former City Weekly reporter who has worked as a private investigator for the past two years. Eric S. Peterson is a City Weekly staff writer.