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You cannot meet in person with Utah legislators before the legislative session begins. I appreciate their willingness to serve in the legislature, and we don’t always agree on issues. My concerns haven’t changed much since last year. We hope that our legislators will consider these concerns as they make their decisions.
We feel it is important for legislators to delegate governance to the entities given that responsibility by our constitution, such as state boards of education, county governments, local boards of education, and city governments. If they feel that the entities in the state are not living up to their responsibilities, they should at best review and set updated standards and then let other constitutionally-established governments in the state handle the details. increase.
Hopefully, legislators will resist the temptation to micromanage public education. In the past, some legislators have introduced bills on school evaluation, teacher performance pay, and teacher certification. There have been recent efforts to legislate classroom curricula and teaching materials, some of which make teaching more challenging. Such decisions should be left to the state board of education.
Two sessions ago, Congress did some good things in the public education funding process, but it will never recover the millions of dollars that were taken from public education due to changes in income tax allocations that began in the mid-1990s. I could not do it. Therefore, instead of further cutting taxes, the income tax “surplus” is not used as a surplus, but rather as a way to restore some of the lost public education revenue to better fund underfunded public education programs. Please consider using it as available funds.
I appreciate that legislators have resisted voucher-type proposals. All previous proposals have adversely affected public school funding, staffing and operations.
My guess is that Utah still has the highest number of students per student in the nation, so it’s not reasonable to expect the state to have very high per-student spending. As an educational support staff, improve teacher salaries, reduce class sizes, and improve classroom conditions to be sufficient to attract and retain good teachers.
A legislative practice with unintended consequences is cutting taxes to attract new businesses to the state. Stop it. Giving tax incentives to attract new business reduces the income needed to cover the increased costs incurred by the new business. More schools, more maintenance, more infrastructure upgrades, more law enforcement, more social services. The cost of housing is already too high. Expensive for young recruits. Not only during rush hour, our highways are congested. The demise of the Great Salt Lake is largely due to the increasing number of businesses and employees that have moved to the Salt Lake Valley in recent years.
Fiscal responsibility isn’t just about making ends meet at the lowest possible tax rate. This means ensuring that critical needs such as public education, law enforcement, health care, and social services are covered as much as possible, even if it requires additional taxes.
I and many other Utah people wish there was a way to cancel inland ports for all the downsides like increased highway diesel truck traffic, destruction of lake bed wildlife habitat I think.
And I especially hope that enough members of Congress will resist attempts to make public land national.
If legislators were willing to make rules limiting the number of bills that could be introduced during a session, it could give them the time they needed to properly consider proposed bills. Although we did not know how many bills and resolutions were requested before they were numbered in the 2022 session, the total number of bills numbered in the House was 492 bills and 45 resolutions. The Senate has 260 bills and 11 resolutions. This is a total of 752 bills and 56 resolutions, of which 512 passed, including his HB11 veto override, participation in student athletics. This compares with last year’s 1,216 bills requested, numbering 699 bills and 75 resolutions, of which 502 were passed. So my guess is that at least 1,200 bills should have been requested at the start of the session.
Our Congress is made up of 29 senators and 75 representatives, for a total of 104 members. That means an average of about 12 bills per legislator are required. If our legislature only limits the bills a legislator can demand in one session to five or six, how many good bills will be debated in future legislative sessions and the need for amendments? I can only imagine how much less
Again, thank you for your dedication to service. enjoy.
Fred Ash, Legislative Chairman of the Utah Retirement School Workers Association.
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