Utah Legislature Big Ticket Agenda with Biggest-Ever Budget and Even Finishes Early
Buoyed by a $29.4 billion budget, the fattest in state history, Utah lawmakers strategically and systematically authored one of the most consequential and controversial legislative sessions — certain to create ripple effects — in recent memory.
And yet it somehow seemed pretty smooth.
From banning abortion clinics to funding all-day kindergarten to finally passing school vouchers to potentially eliminating state sales tax on food in exchange for a significant tax cut, the 2023 Utah Legislature opened and closed with red letter weeks.
Lawmakers threw $500 million downstream to bolster the shrinking Great Salt Lake — but were criticized for not earmarking enough. They resurrected the Zion Curtain for private parties but uncorked more liquor permits for the state’s growing hospitality industry. They targeted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in higher education, a move less, perhaps, about policy then scoring political points. And, in an extraordinary opening week, the Republican-led chambers approved vouchers for private schools and home schoolers in a bill tied to teacher pay raises — and they restricted healthcare services for transgender youth.
In all, the 2023 session produced a whopping 575 pieces of legislation comprised of 342 house bills and 233 senate bills — and finished 2.5 hours early. Early enough for Gov. Cox to tweet from a lively downtown party in a dig at Charles Barkley, who slammed Salt Lake for being boring during the NBA All-Star Weekend.
Walk Softly And Carry an Anvil
Two of Utah’s ticking bombs for policy hounds and politicians are the affordable housing crisis and increasingly congested transportation systems. Lawmakers funneled substantial funding to both.
Affordable housing and a loan program for first-time buyers got a boost. So did the state’s highways, FrontRunner commuter rail system, and pre-gondola projects in the clogged Cottonwood canyons.
“We had this opportunity to make some generational investments and that’s what you saw happen,” explained Robert Spendlove, the state’s former chief economist and now vice chair of the Executive Appropriations committee.
Spendlove says that three years ago, economists thought the economy would contract. He credits the federal government for stepping in quickly to stem the tide but insists the CARES Act also caused the economy to overheat, bringing the big surge in tax revenues and a responsibility given the ongoing inflation to allocate the money judiciously.
Senate President Stuart Adams took a victory lap on that front, calling the session extraordinary.
“We worked with foresight to make decisions that will positively impact generations and serve the deserving people of Utah,” Adams said. “We made record-breaking investments in education, water, housing, transportation, and cut taxes for the third year.”
Public education advocates were whipsawed by getting a relative windfall on one side while suffering some deep bruises on another. Legislators approved the equivalent of an 18 percent bump for Utah’s classrooms along with nearly $26 million for at-risk students. But the Utah Education Association couldn’t stop this year’s well-oiled vouchers machine that tied a $6,000 teacher pay raise to $8,000 scholarships for qualifying families for private schools and home school.
“That was something that they wanted to get done early — they specifically planned that,” says Matthew Burbank, a political science professor at the University of Utah. “It moved through the Legislature at an unbelievable speed. There was clearly an intent by the legislative leadership to try to package things they wanted even if that was not the most popular.”
Spendlove notes allocating tax dollars for private school programs started a decade ago with the Carson Smith Scholarship that has proved popular over time. “It’s one of the reasons I love the term that states are laboratories for innovation,” he says, adding that the new vouchers-dubbed-scholarships program is pretty limited, with eligibility capped and tied to a percentage of the federal poverty level.
“The thing I am most proud of is all-day kindergarten,” Spendlove continued. “I was fortunate enough to be the sponsor this year. It’s another area that we’ve been working on for 20 years.”
As of today, Utah has the lowest percentage of all-day kindergarten students in the country, with three out of 10. Nationally, the average is eight out of 10. The new legislation covers the $97 million annual price tag, Spendlove says.
“We were able to get the program fully funded throughout the state and to me, that’s a huge investment.”
Another package deal also pairs competing interests with significant implications. Lawmakers passed a $400 million tax cut package that lowers the state income tax rate from 4.85 percent to 4.65 percent. It will also eliminate the state sales tax on food if voters approve a constitutional amendment in 2024 that would essentially free up income tax for other uses besides the existing earmark for education.
“We have this kind of Chinese wall between the income tax and the sales tax on how they can be used and that just creates a lot of difficult issues,” Spendlove says. Because we tax goods and not services, he adds, unless we remove the constitutional barrier on sales tax, it makes our revenues unsustainable.
Even so, the one-two punch was a doozy for the UEA, which nonetheless plans to sue the state next year, insiders say, just in time to gum up the vouchers funding before it can get started.
Despite getting some pressure, Cox did not hesitate to sign the big-ticket items, including vouchers, into law.
“Thank you, legislators, for your hard work on so many important issues,” the governor tweeted as the session wrapped. “The decisions you made will greatly improve the lives of Utahns.”
Partisan Lean — and Mean?
Perhaps nowhere than on Utah’s Capitol Hill do lawmakers eagerly espouse practicing “The Utah Way” while also politicking in the quixotic pursuit of exposing “the woke mob.”
Those divergent tracks saw plenty of traction this session as priority statewide needs sometimes took a backseat to message bills. Before most people could even locate committee rooms in those January days, the House and Senate had suspended rules to fast-track legislation banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, while passing a politically charged vouchers bill famously rejected by voters in a 2007 referendum. Both measures are part of larger nationwide movements.
Later in the session, language surfaced about a (now signed) ban on abortion clinics — relegating the procedure to hospitals — along with attempts to roll back mail-in voting and DEI initiatives on college campuses.
“This is a bill in search of a problem,” Burbank says about the latter. He points out that GOP lawmakers in Utah often parrot ideas gleaned from right-wing organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, or even other legislatures, lately Florida.
“They’ve done this for a long time. These are message bills. This is nothing new,” Burbank says. “I don’t think Gov. Cox has really played the role that Gov. Huntsman, Gov. Herbert and Gov. Leavitt did, where they would have private meetings to head off hyper-partisan bills. Legislative leadership seems to be much more willing…to pass legislation that they probably know are not really good ideas. But it’s all about scoring political points.”
Utah’s transgender bill, signed by Cox a day after it was sent to his desk, prohibits transgender surgery for youth and disallows hormone treatments for minors who have not yet been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The ACLU of Utah has warned about “potentially catastrophic effects” of the prohibition.
For his part, Spendlove was more circumspect about the so-called message bills.
“It’s just the nature to me of democracy that we go through pendulum shifts,” he says. “There is a nationwide shift in some attitudes. DEI is a relatively new concept and a lot of these elected officials are concerned that pendulum has swung too far and they’re trying to bring it back.”
Salty Debate Over the Lake
Those old enough to remember the dystopian sand storms during the Mad Max movies likely feel a tad uneasy by predictions of a toxic stew unfurled upon the Wasatch Front should the Great Salt Lake continue to recede. It’s not entirely uncommon to hear people openly discuss leaving Utah in preparation.
The Utah Legislature is no stranger to the dire warnings surrounding the ever-shrinking lake. A handful of members famously took a helicopter ride overhead and now evangelize about the need to save it.
So, it was no surprise to see Great Salt Lake concerns take a front seat this session — so long as you could make it to the capitol through all the snow. And therein lies the problem. Turns out the unrelenting string of snowstorms, from November to March, has caused a bit of a whitewash alongside the whiteouts, critics say.
Indeed, lawmakers announced mid-session that the winter’s record snowfall had allowed them to stop short of enacting “emergency” water-saving policies.
“Mother Nature really helped us out,” Sen. Scott Sandal, (R-Tremonton) said during the session. “We didn’t have to pull that lever for emergency use.”
Make no mistake: a $500 million investment from the state to the Great Salt Lake is impressive and unprecedented.
“In the past it was astronomical to spend $50 million or $100 million” (on water conservation), Spendlove says. “We never had the money to do it and this year we had it.”
Local officials, environmentalists and plenty of conservation-minded groups, were disappointed the legislature didn’t go further.
“It is problematic because we’ve been hearing for a couple sessions about what a priority the lake is,” Burbank says. “The reality is, they’re probably 20 years too late.”
If the state is going to actually change the way water is allocated, he notes, it won’t happen in just one session. Real policy change could take three or four.
“Legislators never ever want to bring that up,” Burbank says. “They don’t want to talk about agricultural uses of water. They don’t want to talk about cities growing and consumers taking up all the water. We’ve known for a pretty good number of years that was the direction we were headed.”
But just this week, Utahns got a splash of hopeful news with the announcement that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will permanently donate 5,700 water shares, roughly the size of Little Dell Reservoir, to the Great Salt Lake.
“We are so grateful to the church for their generosity and stewardship,” Cox tweeted following the announcement. “Together with the state’s $1 billion investment and massive policy changes, the future of the lake has never been more secure!”
First-year Senator Nate Blouin, while offering “huge applause” to the LDS Church, also pumped the brakes, pointing out the state is still in a drought. “This is a great step for the church,” he tweeted. “But it won’t save the lake in itself. Those two things are independent of one another.”
Oddities & Ongoing Fights
Of all the things on your 2023 bingo card, pinning the U.S. Magnesium plant by the Great Salt Lake for a staggering 25 percent of northern Utah’s winter inversion seems like a longshot.
And yet, Utah lawmakers voted to regulate emissions from U.S. Magnesium in an effort to keep the plant from choking Utahns every January and February going forward.
The move was just one of the oddities during a session filled with big headlines despite relatively little friction.
One exception was the unexpected fight over passage of the new state flag.
“What was shocking about it was that having done so much to look like this process was going to sail through…but it was actually a pretty close vote,” Burbank shrugged. “That surprised me.”
Two years of public submissions led by a task force — and momentum among the vexillology community — and still organized opposition nearly derailed it. In the end, the flag bill passed with a small bipartisan margin, meaning the new Beehive Flag will soon be unfurled on a flagpole near you. The old state flag will remain at the Governor’s Mansion to be displayed on holidays and special state events.
At least that was the thought. A small group of eight Utahns have recently filed a referendum to send the new flag design to voters in 2024, where they can decide whether to adopt it or not.
The detractors face a herculean task. By April 12, they must produce 134,298 signatures, according to rules by the lieutenant governor’s office pertaining to a petition.
“We feel something generational like this should have a mandate,” Chad Saunders, one of the leaders of the referendum movement told KUTV.
The new flag has a beehive in the middle with a snowy white mountain motif, red base symbolizing southern Utah, and a five-point star representing the state’s native tribes.
While the flag flap may garner some social media hits, the story of the 2023 Utah Legislature is about lawmakers clearly flying their flag. Their agenda was hoisted early and often. And while it may cast a shadow for some, it is not coming down anytime soon.
