Kicking Off a New Utah Legislative Session

Utah legislative news is splashed all over the Standard-Examiner this morning, with excellent bill agenda wrap-ups here and here.

We've had private conversations with several local legislators recently, and we think the Std-Ex gets it right with this Associated Press piece. Utah legislators have an extra $1.6 billion dollars burning a hole in their pockets this year. Dealing with the current budget surplus will be a major battle ground; and Utah's lawmakers are scrambling madly to dole it out.

For our own part, we're leaning toward Governor Huntman's proposal, which would yield the taxpayers a $100 million tax cut, and yet increase public education spending by $382 million. This plan would be fine with us, so far as education spending increases are specifically earmarked for teacher salaries and other specified needs, and not siphoned off and applied to our already top-heavy and redundant school administrate functions. We think this year would be a fine time also, for the legislature to look into consolidating local school-board authority. Throughout Utah we have cadres of highly paid administrators performing identical tasks in a variety of local school districts. The public school management system is horribly inefficient. Now may be the time, we think, to look into following the private corporate model, and to start consolidating the school district management function into a more centralized authority.

We note that the Std-Ex editors are still obsessing over Senator Greiner's Hatch Act "problem". We think they're making mountains out of molehills, and that they simply need to get used to the idea that Stuart Reid is NOT our new State Senator, despite their best efforts to install their neoCON Golden Boy into the Senate 18 seat. Case precendent has already been set in the Perkins Case. There can be no turning back for the Justice Office of Special Council, we think, regardless of their perceived need to micro-manage Utah government from Washington. We're 100% certain Greiner will prevail in court, if the need arises. So we think the Standard-Examiner should just get over it, and move on to more useful and worthy public crusades -- such as screeching for less secrecy in government.

We invite our readers to offer their own comments on any of the above, or simply regard this thread as open-topic.