We’re now mid-session with the Utah State Legislature and, while many things have been settled, there are still many matters left to be decided.
Settled is the gay rights debate. Settled is the budget controversy. Remaining are ethics and health care reforms, liquor laws, illegal immigration, the Western Climate Initiative, and, what’s known as the PTA bill.
I think we’ve turned a corner on ethics reform. The biggest hurdle has been to convince legislators that there’s a huge perception problem. For the last few years, they’ve settled on the idea that isolated problems have arisen and have been addressed. But what they failed to fully comprehend is the public’s perceptions of their dealings. In fact, they’d been responding in the absolute opposite, and wrong, way – the more they get criticized the more they’ve been inclined to think that doing something was an admission of guilt – and then they get themselves caught in a vicious public relations cycle. The less they do about it, the more they get criticized, the more they get criticized, the less they do about it.
But that appears to be over now. I think they finally understand that they have to address the public’s perceptions of what they do and how they do it. Don’t expect too much this session, but more will unfold.
Health care reform is a similar story. Expectations were set very high and not much will happen this session. One good thing to come out of the Health Care Task Force has been that special interests have been reminded that they don’t have carte blanche to decide health policy. IHC is still the 800 pound gorilla but insurance companies, in general, have been reminded that the sun doesn’t rise and set on them.
Liquor law reforms might not occur at all this session. Despite the hullabaloo, no one is really too excited to tackle it. On the one hand, reformers had pressed hard only to realize that the antidote might be worse than the disease. And, on the other hand, I think opponents to reform have more work to do to see how they can improve the law without diminishing policy objectives.
Illegal immigration is constantly pressing legislators and the passage of SB 81 didn’t do anything to quell that pressure. In fact, if anything, SB 81 only exacerbated the public debate. There have been efforts afoot to postpone the implementation date of July 1, but all of those efforts will die in the Senate. The next best piece of legislation on the table seems to be one that will create an economic study of the impacts of illegal immigration.
Governor Huntsman’s Western Climate Initiative will get a broadside hit this session as pro-energy legislators will attack its core assumptions. Two bills have a good likelihood of passing. The first is a resolution calling on the Governor to pull out of the Initiative and the second bill would require all climate initiative proposals to first go through economic analyses before the state could commit any time, money or resources to global warming. The first one doesn’t require the Governor’s signature; the second does.
Lastly, a growing brushfire has been lit under the PTA. The PTA is the recognized voice of parents in Utah’s public schools. Other parent organizations not only want equal recognition – meaning, in their infancy, equal access – but there are many low-income parents who would love to be in leadership positions of the PTA who are deterred by both the small fee and the big attitude that PTA doesn’t need new people or new thinking. This one’s a good bill just to watch smug special interests squirm.
We live in a great state and democracy works here better than most places. While debates will rage, there is every hope that our processes will continue to work as intended – good ideas will rise to the surface and bad ideas will fade into the distant past.
