Special Session

The legislature just finished the special session and cut budgets by 272 million dollars. Do I agree with all the cuts..... no. I felt we should have included public education in some of the cuts, given the fact we have funded them so favorably the past couple of years. We have new education programs due to come on line over the course of the next year and I question the wisdom of that approach. The money we appropriated during the general session of 2008 should have been reexamined in its entirety without the provision of holding any agency in state government harmless. Should we have been allowed to do this I am sure there would have been some improvement in the end product.

"Did we balance the budget? "

Yes, however going forward I hope the fences that are constructed around some programs will be lowered. For those of you that think I have lost my mind about not holding public education harmless I would remind you my day job is in the public education world. I do recognize the challenges of being the lowest funded public education program in the nation. At the same time public education should have participated to some degree in the budget discussion. There were many in the education community that would have been willing to reduce their budget to minimize the hardship in other areas of government. Some of the budget reductions such as the one time money for performance pay, the new on going funding for a Pre Kindergarten computer program. These are just a couple of examles of adjustments that could have been made. Largely I view educaton, both K-12 and Higher Education, not as a government expenditures but as investments in our economy however sometimes you need to adjust your investments when hard times come around.

East West Traffic Congestion

Today during our interim meetings the Department of Transportation gave a presentation dealing with East West traffic flows in Salt Lake County and some ideas to reduce the gridlock. One of the ideas was to create unbalanced and reversible lanes during peek traffic times. I think the idea is a great idea as it increases capacity on our roads going in certain directions when we need increased traffic flow. There was also some talk about the West side Belt Route and creating an interchange at 5400 South near the Taylorsville City Hall. I am less enthused about this proposal but am willing to listen to the proposal and weigh it based upon sound data. I would be interested in hearing from you all about the proposal, particularly related to the unbalanced and reversible lanes.