The Utah Transit Authority is trying to plug what it says is a 10 percent hole in its revenue stream from the two counties because of the Legislature's lifting of a sales tax on food. Other counties in the bus and rail service area already have approved a 0.05 percent sales tax to make up for UTA's losses, but Davis and Weber have balked.

Agency officials met with county commissioners Thursday to make their case. The local elected officials remained skeptical that UTA really needs the money when economic growth has swelled sales-tax receipts, even with the food tax cut.

"I'm still not completely convinced of the direction they'd like us to take," Davis County Commissioner Louenda Downs said after the meeting. She and her colleagues agreed that constituents already hard hit by property value escalations will see UTA's plan as an untimely tax increase, even though it restores only $7 of the $52 per person that the food-tax reprieve saved them.

UTA budgets average good and bad revenue years, instead of rising and falling with the economy.

The county officials questioned UTA's November announcement of possible cuts. That list included an end to Saturday and evening commuter rail service even before FrontRunner starts running between Ogden and Salt Lake in April.

"What's on the table seems to be the real glamour or high-profile items," Davis County Commissioner Bret Millburn said. "Have we looked at the whole?" Some buses appear to run more often than ridership would justify, he said, so they should suffer before commuter rail.

UTA General Manager John Inglish told the commissioners that the list of possible cuts was a "knee-jerk" response to show the magnitude of needed cuts, not necessarily a plan. He agreed to have the agency staff study bus routes in the two counties and return to them with a new scenario for cuts before they decide on the tax increase.

bloomis@sltrib.com