Becky Edwards

Week Seven Legislative Newsletter

Bills of interest from the last week of the session:

HB 272, “Pilot Program for Autism Spectrum Disorders Services.”  A pilot program providing early intervention to 200 children, age 2-6.

HB 15, “Statewide Adaptive Testing.”  This bill would allow for school districts to begin administering the UPASS test online.  The new mode of testing should make tracking our students’ progression easier and target their needs more effectively.

HB 155, “Drug Screening for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Recipients.”  This bill would begin a program to ensure that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits are used appropriately by requiring additional screening for drug use and providing rehab programs for those in need.

HB 173, “Transportation Funding Amendments.”  Advances critical road projects while reducing the amount of bonds and saving the taxpayer money on interest.  Includes $7.0 Million for the 2600 S. I-15 interchange overhaul.

HB 502, “Incorporation Amendments.”  This bill amends the requirements to incorporate a city.  It makes the incorporation process more efficient and simpler.

HB 3, “Appropriations Adjustments.”  The “bill of bills,” the budget for the upcoming year.  Highlights include:  $11 million additional for the rainy day fund, $20,000 to post signs along highways honoring fallen Utah Highway Patrol troopers, and uses funds from the Cigarette Tax Restricted Account to fund health promotion programs.  We were able to amend the bill to provide additional funds for the Division Services for People with Disabilities.

HB 124, “In-state Tuition for Veterans.”  This bill would allow those military personnel who are transferred to the state of Utah be allowed to be considered residents for the purposes of higher education tuition.

HB 354,”Alcohol Beverage Amendments.”  In order to increase government transparency, this bill transfers control of funds collected from mark-up of liquor sales to the Tax Commission.  It also begins collecting data on the effects of alcohol in our communities to improve future legislative efforts.

HB 298, “Motor Vehicle Safety Inspections Amendments.”  This bill reduces the number of safety inspections required on vehicles, as well as adds new Utah Highway Patrol troopers to the roads

Human, or Democrat?

As the Legislative session closed at midnight Thursday night, some of the Representatives from the House stood up and gave their farewells to the House members who wouldn’t return the following year.  One farewell in particular that caught me off guard was House Majority Leader Brad Dee’s remarks to departing member of the house, Minority Leader David Litvack.

Being the leaders for their respective parties, the two are forced to interact frequently throughout the session.  One would expect politeness and cordiality in such an interaction, but what I saw just about made me fall off my chair.  Imagine Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor chumming it up in the hallway of the D.C. Capitol, playfully teasing the other about their fashion sense or something funny that happened during Floor Debate that day.  You have to contort your face and sort of squint your eyes to even try to picture it, right?  But that is exactly the relationship I witnessed time and again between Dee and Litvack throughout the entire session!  It was like watching two little leaguers goofing off in the baseball dugout.

But as I said before, what really got me was Dee’s farewell to Litvack.  He stood up and with tears in his eyes and a quiver to his voice expressed how much he’d miss him.  Now if you thought Cantor and Pelosi being chummy was a stretch, tearing up at either one’s farewell is enough to make you belly laugh.  Yet, it was totally sincere.  They embraced afterwards, and I noticed that my eyes were starting to get a little moist and cloudy.

So…why?  Why should their relationship be any different than what we’ve come to expect in a world of barbarous cutthroat politics?  Now I know some people will say that the Democratic Party is so insignificant in our super-majority state that the two never probably never really had anything to fight about—I mean, the Democrats just have to go belly-up anytime the Republicans want to do anything here right?  Well actually, the typical response of a minority party in a free-speech country like ours is to respond bitterly and fiercely to the majority, viewing them as a kind of tyrant.  Being pushed around doesn’t usually go over well with opinionated breeds like politicians.  So it was clear to me that their relationship was hardly the “master-slave” kind.  With that in mind, I happen to agree with what Rep. Dee said in his farewell address to Rep. Litvack:  “We’ve come to view each other and define ourselves as human beings rather than as Republican and Democrat.”  How refreshing.  I believe that’s something we could all be reminded of a little more often.

One of the biggest priorities in the last week of the legislative session is finishing work on the final budget.  We were able to address our main priorities, including fully funding education, avoiding tax increases, and paying down our debt.  Our choices help ensure our status as one of the strongest and most competitive states in the nation.  The complete final budget can be found here:

http://www.le.utah.gov/lfa/reports/bbib/APPEXE_03-08-12_5.pdf

Have you ever wondered where your tax dollars go?  How is the legislature budgeting the state revenue?

Or more specifically, do you:

Want to find out if the 2600 S. I-15 interchange got funded at $7.0 Million?

What ever happened to the Women’s College Task Force?

How many additional corrections beds are contracted with counties at a cost of $2.3 Million?

Amount the Weighted Pupil Unit (WPU) in the Minimal School Program increased?

How much funding was set aside for the two year Autism Pilot Program?.

(Spoiler alert:  Funded; $100,000; 60; $26.00; $4.5 Million to help 200 children age 2-6.)

This morning was the last official legislative meeting with  the Davis County Chamber of Commerce.  What a great group!  Although our formal interaction concludes after the session ends this group works year round to analyze issues and work for businesses, schools, and families of Davis County.  I really appreciate their perspective and feedback.

We have arrived at the final 4 days of the 2012 annual session!  So what can you expect? These last 4 days are intense with floor time going from 8:00 am until late in the evening.  On the final night we will adjourn (Sine die in Latin) at midnight until the start of the 2013 legislative session.  Actually, we have consistently adjourned before midnight each session I’ve served and I have a secret wish to be passing bills like crazy right up until the stroke of midnight.  Maybe this year

This coming week we will debate the “bill of bills” the term we have affectionately given the final budget bill of the year. The bill of bills contains the last remaining budgetary items that have won funding and have been finalized in the very last Executive Appropriation Committee meeting. It will contain all the facets of the $13 billion budget.  We are required to balance the budget every year, which we can only do with the help of our tremendously talented and hard working staff members from the offices of Legislative Research and General Counsel and Legislative Fiscal Analyst.  They actually do all the drafting of the bills and pull together all the numbers to assess how much it will cost to implement every bill (I believe that number this year was upwards of 800) filed this year.  Drive past the Capitol any night this week and you’ll see lights on until the wee hours of the morning in the west House building, 2nd and 3rd floors.  Many thanks to those great folks!
Some of the funding items you are likely to see in the bill of bills will be additional funding for Public Education, which we were able to include because our revenue estimates have grown from what was originally projected at about $280 million to now about $422 million. Here is a preliminary list of new spending items for Public Education:

$41 million for enrollment growth for the 12,500 new students that will start school next year,
$5 million for teacher supplies,
$7 million for computer adaptive testing,
$5 million for small, rural schools,
Nearly $22 million in per pupil spending increases,
$5 million for online testing,
$2.5 million for charter schools,
Over $1 million for special education students,
$5 million for school buildings

I’ll post the remainder of the budget as soon as we receive it.  Thanks for your interest and involvement in the issues.  I always appreciate hearing from you.  Keep the feedback coming!

Week Six Legislative Newsletter

During the session we meet twice a week for lunch as a Majority Caucus.  These are usually open meetings and interested parties, legislative staff, media, and the public can attend.  As the session winds down we begin to meet every day for a Caucus Lunch.  This is the scene from today as we were discussing the budget.  The prioritization lists from each Appropriations Committee were discussed for both one-time and ongoing funding.  The House has $2.5M for each of ongoing and one-time funding (for a total of $5.0M) that can be put back in for additional priorities that didn’t make this initial list.  That money will go quickly as there are hundreds of millions on the priority list, including several bills of mine.

Last night we were in the chamber until almost 11:00 pm passing bills.  We had a break for dinner for a couple of hours and then came back and heard 4 important land bills.  These are basically state’s rights bills that assert Utah’s right to own and control our own land.  Currently the federal government owns and controls 66% of the land of Utah.  This means that Utah misses out on the tax revenue that would come from that land if it were held privately.  The 11 western states have significantly higher percentages of their land held by the federal government than the states in the mid and eastern part of the U.S.  This federal land grab violates the Enabling Act, an agreement we made with the federal government when Utah became a state.  At any rate, in a nutshell, these bills are an assertion of Utah’s rights over those lands, stipulates the federal government will need to begin transferring parcels back to the state, describes penalties if that action is not taken, and other details.  These are important bills because if we’re able to accomplish what these bills are intended to do, our tax revenue that could be utilized for public education for instance would be tremendous.  Critics will say these are message bills and we have no chance of getting these lands back from the feds.  Very possible, but nothing will ever happen if we don’t combine our state efforts with those of our federal delegation, Senators and Congressmen.  Hopefully we will get this done.

At the end of our time on the floor, we had an announcement and the “board was wiped.”  This means all the items on the Third Reading Calendar got taken off and put back into a hat where leadership takes into account the preferences of the legislative membership and their own prioritization and reorders the bills on the calendar.  This only happens once a session and if your bills are not heard before the board is wiped you are in a really bad spot.

I’m happy to report that HB 304, “Access to Voter Date of Birth Records,” passed off the House floor today.  Ron Mortensen, a constituent and friend, has worked with me for several years on this issue.  This session we ended up with a substitute bill that provides for an “opt-out” where voters can choose to make private their birthdate information on their voter registration data.  The House showed a tremendous amount of support with a 66-4 vote.  This is an important issue that is a good example of constituent-driven legislation.  Ron and others worked hard on their end to serve as citizen lobbyists for this bill while I was working on my end to forge a compromise with other stakeholders, including the Republican and Democratic parties.  I’m appreciative of the opportunity to work with these great people.

In honor of the bill, a Happy Birthday song from the Beatles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjF1bG5LUcs

We heard several bills in the Education Committee this morning dealing with the issue of Charter school funding.  HB 392, “Charter School Funding Revisions,” addresses the distribution of School District funds to Charters, and HB 398, “Allocation of School Trust Lands Funds,” prescribes the way SITLA funds are distributed to community councils in Charter schools.
The legislature has not had a significant study of the funding for public schools since 1992, including the WPU.  Since the inception of Charters in the state there has not been a study.  We are in need of a collaborative approach to this issue that will address fair funding for Charter students, who currently represent 8% of our total public school student population.  The percentage of property tax revenue that goes into Charters, district by district, is not something that is understood by most taxpayers.  HB 392 is an attempt to 1) provide notice of the distribution of funds for both public education and charters as a set within public education, and 2) fundamentally change the balance of Charter funding between the Minimum School Program of the State (currently 75%) and the School Districts (currently 25%).  The district money goes to the state and then comes back at out to the Charters, as an average across the property tax revenues, every student receiving about 20% of district funding only from specific levies.  The bill is an attempt to make that funding balance more reflective of the actual revenue collected per district.  Some districts are net winners with this change and some are net losers.  Overall, the discussion today in Committee was evidence that the complexity of the issue really warrants sending the bill to interim study, which is exactly what happened, with my support.  I am committed to finding a mechanism and formula that provides fair and equitable funding for every student in our state and feel this deserves our very best efforts and analysis.  A move to interim study will allow this issue to be studied in a thorough manner and I am in support of that.

The topic of “Federal Funding” in our Bagels and Briefings meeting this morning was so interesting.  The power point presentation can be found here:
http://le.utah.gov/lrgc/briefings/FedBudgetActionsImpactUtah2012.pdf
In a nutshell, Utah is a net importer of federal dollars.  For every $1.00 we put in, we get back $1.50 from the federal government.  Where do we spend those dollars?  Primarily in Health and Human Services, then Education, Transportation and others.  Best estimates state that over a period of a few years, states can expect a 9% decrease in federal funding.  What does this mean in real dollars?  For Education, receiving $257M of federal dollars, that means a decrease in $24M, most of what would have to be backfilled because of Title I and Special Ed programs.  Other losses would be $34M of the $348 M coming from the feds for Transportation, $13M of $140M in the area of Health and Human Services, $4M loss from $43M in Agriculture.  The areas of Education, Energy, Environment, Health and Human Services, Housing, Justice, Labor will carry the brunt of the cuts.

So, what is Utah doing to prepare for this inevitability?  HB 138 of the 2011 General Session requires:  1) Agencies must report plans in the case of a 5-25% cut in federal funds, 2) Legislature must authorize each federal grant over $1M, and 3) the Executive Appropriations Committee must authorize federal grants during the interim.  There is a lot of other gloom and doom in the presentation linked above, but the key to remember is that the Utah legislature is in a better position than other states because of our responsible and effective budgeting process.

During our Republican Caucus at lunch we spent time going through every House bill with a fiscal note.  You had one minute to sell your bill, less if all you had to say was “this bill is dead.”  I had an opportunity to do both