I saw a bobcat twice in the same day this week. It was feeding on a road-kill deer about a mile down the canyon from my house. It was there in the morning, and when I came home later in the afternoon, it was still there. It moved up the hill pretty quickly when I stopped the car, but I got a good look at it.
The bald eagles are along the river bottom again. They vanished for a while there, maybe because the river was freezing over, making it hard to fish. But it’s generally been a rough year for wildlife.
Speaking of carrion, the legislature is back in session. While it’s easy to hold these people in utter contempt, the frightening thing is that they are elected. Their blockheaded actions are some kind of reflection of the people of Utah who keep sending them back to the Capitol year after year. Most years, I’ve followed their antics pretty closely. But I came to the conclusion that it was really bad for my mental state. I can’t change what they do, they will all get re-elected anyway (even that Buttars guy), and somehow the state muddles through despite their efforts. In fact, having an insane legislature may be a reasonable growth-mitigation strategy.
While the rest of the country would welcome some of the growth we continue to experience here in Utah, I’ve reached a point that I’d eagerly support policies that convinced a half million people to pull up stakes and move. At the rate we are going, the Salt Lake suburbs will soon extend from Grantsville to Vernal with a strip mall on every corner in between.
There’s nothing the Republicans hate more than the income tax, except maybe the property tax. So the general move this year is to lower both of those and see if they can’t load up the sales-tax burden. But that’s not enough. Some of the state’s school districts are growing so fast that they can’t keep up with the demand for new school buildings. We’ve been there; done that. So rather than demand that new development pay its actual costs and impose a school-impact fee, the wise men of the legislature have decided that they need to use Park City’s tax base to subsidize school-building projects on the suburban sprawl of the Wasatch Front.
Then they decided that they don’t like the restaurant sales tax, which adds a little to the cost of restaurant meals to fund construction of tourism-related facilities. There was a deep-seated fear that somewhere, somebody who wasn’t a tourist, was paying an extra 20 cents a plate at the neighborhood Red Lobster. So that was wrong. Instead, they want to repeal that, and raise the general sales tax on everything. The increase is modest enough, and on a personal level you’ll never notice the difference. But while the restaurant tax got to stay in the jurisdiction that raised it, and be spent in the community it came from, the general sales tax gets thrown into the common pot. From there, a big chunk of it gets sprinkled around on the basis of population, regardless of where the money came from.
That’s a move that will cost Summit County about $600,000 a year. Instead of the tourists paying a local sales tax that ends up getting spent locally on things the tourists use (like buses, trails, etc.), they will help fund snowplows in tourist Meccas like Bountiful, South Jordan, Herriman, and Saratoga Springs. Those are the places where suburban sprawl has overwhelmed existing government services and the local ability to pay for them. Again, we wouldn’t want to impose impact fees on growth so that it paid its own way. That smacks of socialism, while raiding the tax base of Summit County and Park City to subsidize the routine operations of the Salt Lake suburbs is somehow sound Republican conservatism.
But of course the hot issue is immigration. It’s quite clear under the Constitution that immigration is a federal responsibility. It’s also quite clear that Congress is a worthless organization that is incapable of doing anything, let alone manage something as complicated as immigration. So the Utah Legislature is going to have the Department of Motor Vehicles solve it. No drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. That will fix things. Of course that means they can’t get car insurance. The public benefits of having large numbers of people who may not read English driving around our crowded freeways without insurance should be perfectly obvious.
The problem there really is that both the state and federal governments are trying to turn drivers’ licenses into something closer to a passport than a system of regulation traffic safety. I don’t think the DMV is really the appropriate place to manage immigration. They can barely manage issuing drivers’ licenses. Let’s leave the DMV in the business of testing drivers, revoking licenses for bad driving, and testing new drivers to make sure they understand the difference between a highway route number and a speed-limit sign. Then come up with some other system that addresses immigration status.
The goal of the Limbaugh-centric portion of the legislature is to force all the illegal immigrants to leave. While I’m not a big supporter of illegality, I have to wonder how Utah, with a 3 percent unemployment rate, is going to function if that actually happens. The legislature adopted a very punitive bill directed at illegal immigrants and those who employ them, rent to them, or transport them. You may be asked for proof of citizenship when boarding a bus. But in the ultimate act of conviction, it will not take effect for another year. That gives the legislators the ability to go tell their constituents they’ve done something tough, while in fact having done nothing at all. In the twisted world of legislation, this is considered progress by all sides of the debate.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.