Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Robert Breck and troopers Mike Cowdell, Jeff Kearney and Jeff Moskalik found two small girls and their 23-year-old mother trapped in an overturned Chevy truck that had veered into a body of water last December. All four men jumped into the freezing water to free the trapped occupants, saving the children and trying in vain to revive the mother, who died. The previous January, Breck had stuck his hands into a burning truck and used extinguishers to subdue flames licking the cab as he called for firefighter assistance and assured the trapped driver, "If you burn, I burn with you." Thanks to his efforts, the woman was saved. The aforementioned heroes, on average, make between $15 and $17 an hour, and if they are like most of their colleagues in the UHP they hold down one or more part-time jobs to augment their salaries in order to support their families. Highway Patrol troopers' pay, on average, is 26 percent lower than the pay of officers in the Salt Lake City and West Valley City police departments and the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office. They make less than many other city police departments in Salt Lake County and even compare poorly to the salaries paid to the cops in the little town of Clinton in Davis County. Why? Because the salaries of city and county law enforcement agencies are set by their local governments while the Highway Patrol has had to rely on a relatively stingy Utah Legislature and the tepid support of a past governor who was so concerned about the political implications of a tax increase after bonding to redo Interstate 15, and so intent on creating an image as "the education governor," that he paid little notice to the emerging crisis in public safety. The result: Highway Patrol troopers, along with all other state employees, have averaged a pay increase of less than 1 percent a year over the past 10 years. There was a one-time pay bump in the mid-1990s in a separate appropriations bill that earmarked some money for the Department of Public Safety. That came after an intense lobbying effort highlighted by a plea to lawmakers from Karl Malone. But that still left the troopers woefully short of salary levels in local police departments. So many troopers are leaving the UHP for higher-paying police agencies that the patrol has fewer troopers now (283) than five years ago (322). That shortage is exacerbated by former Gov. Mike Leavitt's renovation of the Interstate, where more lanes were instantly filled by increased traffic, making the troopers' job that much harder. One of the recent losses was Trooper Robert Nixon, who left the patrol to take a substantial pay increase with the West Jordan Police Department. Nixon was honored by the Department of Public Safety earlier this year for his expertise in drunk-driving and drug detection. He was responsible last year for 151 DUI arrests and 105 felony and misdemeanor drug arrests and served warrants totaling $454,083. A related problem largely ignored by the Legislature is the lagging pay of state prison guards compared to county jailers. Prison guards, trained at the expense of the state Department of Corrections, start at $11.43 an hour. That compares to the starting pay of $14.31 for Salt Lake County jailers and $14.43 for their counterparts in Utah County. After the state trains the prison guards and they get a little experience, many then jump to the county jails for better pay. The average experience level for a prison guard five years ago was seven years. Now it is three-and-a-half years, while the prison inmate population has doubled over the past decade to nearly 6,000. Former state Sen. Richard Carling, who is chairman of the Utah Highway Patrol Honorary Colonels, recently wrote to gubernatorial candidates Jon Huntsman Jr. and Scott Matheson Jr., asking that they make UHP salaries a priority in their campaigns and in their administrations, whichever is elected. One area where the governor can make an instant impact is in changing the methods by which troopers move up the pay scale. Under the current system, trooper salaries can range from $14.70 per hour at a step 43 on the pay schedule to $22.09 per hour at a step 58. But 75 percent of the troopers are lumped between step 43 and step 48 ($16.84 per hour) and the Department of Human Resources' methodology for step bumps keeps most of the troopers in the lower part of the schedule. A proposed fix in that pay schedule would cost $2.5 million.