It’s not about the dogs. It’s really not about the house, either. I have no dog in this fight and remain pretty agnostic about the house itself. If it complies, it complies, and my opinion doesn’t matter. This is a story about much bigger stuff. The Shakespearian saga of the Princes, who own this newspaper, struggling to get a building permit for their house above Old Town, has drawn international media attention. It’s been covered in everything from the Daily Beast to The Times of London with varying degrees of snark. The stories have mostly been about Sasha & Mocha, a pair of dogs who are getting their 15 minutes of fame.  The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter out, and from what I know of his appointment schedule, he must have spent a couple of nights in town. He attended the opening night performance of the “Park City Follies,” which got a mention in the article. I did not have “my picture is in the WSJ today” on my Bingo card, but there it was.  In the considerable dust storm over house designs and dog temperaments, the important part is getting lost. This is about the working of our government, who has access, and who controls it. For background, the Princes have been pounding away at a planning approval for their new house for better than four years. That’s inexplicable, and really unconscionable.  The history of the subdivision approval is convoluted, but taking four years to make a decision on one house is ridiculous, even for a huge house in a very sensitive site. So it’s no wonder they lost patience. They attempted an end run around the city quagmire in 2023 by asking for a special favor from the state Legislature. That move was seen as a tawdry breach of protocol. Nobody does tawdry like the Utah Legislature.  Despite the local outrage over that, we all have the constitutional right to petition our government, at every level, to request changes in laws. We all share that right equally as citizens. The problem is that some are more equal than others.  If you have a certain income or level of influence, you have the personal phone numbers of the legislative leadership, and they will take your call. If you are the rest of us, your call goes through a legislative switchboard and the message goes into the shredder. That’s a failure on the Legislature’s end, not the Princes’, Dakota-Pacific’s or people looking for billion dollar subsidies for pro sports teams.  In the end, the special favor didn’t make it, and they spent another year in planning purgatory. The Planning Commission finally approved the house. The neighbors, who felt the Planning Commission decision was wrong, exercised their constitutional right to file an appeal. That went before a special administrative appeal panel made up of independent citizens of Park City who reviewed the decision. It has to be the worst volunteer job in the world.  After a six-hour hearing trying to make sense of confusing and often contradictory regulations imposed at different times, by ordinance and plat amendments, they upheld the Planning Commission on most things, and sent it back to the Planning Commission to see if they could clarify one issue. Nobody can complain that the decision hasn’t been thoroughly examined. Cumbersome and slow as it is, the process is working except for the part that is about the dogs. In what looks like retaliation for filing the appeal, the Princes filed two lawsuits covering matters not related to the house — one against the dogs, and one about a wall encroaching on another lot Princes bought.  So for exercising a right guaranteed under the Constitution and local ordinance, parallel to the right Princes exercised when petitioning the Legislature, the Hermanns now need to defend two lawsuits. For people of ordinary means, that could mean bankruptcy.   We’ve seen this before. A group of citizens in Morgan County petitioned to force a referendum on the zoning changes granted for the Wasatch Peaks private ski resort. The developer sued them, and charged ahead with construction while the referendum’s status was in limbo. When the courts finally ruled that there could be a referendum, and stopped all construction, buyers who had paid for multi-million dollar lots started asking for their money back. A settlement was found. But in the meantime, the people pushing for the referendum, which is specifically allowed by state law, had drained retirement savings, mortgaged their houses, and were getting litigated into poverty to defend a principle. So much for participatory democracy. There’s a name for that. It’s called a SLAPP suit, or selective litigation against public participation.   Sometimes it’s about possibly defamatory things said in a heated public hearing; other times it’s about dog poop. I’ve spent enough time on a cattle ranch to recognize it for what it is.  The press covering this story have delighted in the stickers and the cuddly dogs in front of the Egyptian Theater, and the idea of rich people behaving like hillbillies. The story in the WJS was the third most-read story in that edition. Behind the silliness, this is important, and it bothers me that the fundamental issue is lost behind the “Free Sasha & Mocha” stickers. It’s not about the dogs. It’s about your constitutional rights and how our democracy functions.