Several citizens voiced their concerns before members of a Utah legislative committee yesterday afternoon asking them to further investigate the transparency and legality of UTA land dealings. KCPW’s Jessica Gail was at the meeting and explains how the agency responded.
Critics of a proposed Washington County water pipeline say state officials wouldn’t hear them out during a Water Issues Task Force meeting Tuesday. They say the Lake Powell pipeline is wasteful, and financing the project would be a dangerous prospect for Utah taxpayers. Christi Biniaz of Citizens for Dixie’s Future notes that according to the treasurer’s office, if the state issued bonds to pay for the $2 billion project, it would jeopardize its AAA bond rating.
In just over two weeks, the Utah Legislature will meet in a special session and vote on the final redistricting maps for the Utah Senate, House of Representatives, Congress and the state school board. It’s the culmination of a months-long series of public hearings held across the state and at the Capitol.
Hookah tobacco will not be banned in Utah’s bars and clubs after all… at least not for now. In an emergency meeting Tuesday, the legislature’s Administrative Rules Review Committee asked the state health department to hold off on its new changes to the Utah Clean Air Act, saying it didn’t have the authority to make them.
Nearly a month ahead of when the Utah Legislature is set to vote on a new set of political boundaries, another group met at the Capitol Tuesday to present maps it says are more in line with what Utahns want to see in redistricting. Fair Boundaries field director Glenn Wright says the non-partisan group has been working on drawing fair maps since 2010, and wants a chance for its voice to be heard.
More changes could be coming to Utah’s fireworks laws. Republican Senator John Valentine, who co-sponsored the initial changes during the last legislative session, says he now wants to reverse some of them after receiving dozens of complaints from his constituents.
Dozens of teachers rallied outside the Salt Lake City Main Library Friday, calling on state lawmakers to show them more respect and stop what they believe are attacks on public education. Third-grade teacher Heidi Jensen says they gathered in response to what happened in Ogden recently, where teachers were presented a contract to sign without any negotiations. Jensen says lawmakers want to make that a state policy even though they’re not experts on education.
In a special session last week, the Utah Legislature weighed in on the current debt ceiling crisis by passing another resolution urging Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. But it got no support from a clearly frustrated Democratic caucus in the Utah House of Representatives.
For many weeks now, lawmakers on the Utah Legislature’s Redistricting Committee have gotten an earful from communities across the state about how the new legislative and congressional boundaries should be drawn. Some rural cities and towns say ‘give us our own district,’ others say they want to be included with the more urban Wasatch Front. So now that the community hearings are over, how will the legislature take these conflicting ideas and actually draw the boundaries?
State lawmakers sent a clear message to Washington in a special session Wednesday: Utah supports a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But as KCPW’s Jessica Gail reports, some lawmakers thought the discussion happened in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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