This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Imagine if a committee of 104 people tried to oversee a business. You could end up with a mess like the one the Legislature has created in its battle with Gov. Gary Herbert over the four-day workweek for state employees.
To hear the governor tell it, no one disagrees that state services should be open to the public five days a week. But when it passed HB328 in March to mandate that services be open five days a week, the Legislature did not provide the roughly $800,000 the governor estimates would be needed to convert from four-day operations to five-day service. That's why he vetoed HB328. Now the Legislature has overridden that veto, but still has not provided the necessary $800,000.
This is no way to run a railroad or a government. But it is a way to railroad a government, and to derail both employee morale and public confidence.
All of this arises from mistrust. The Legislature does not trust the governor to provide public services to the people five days a week, even though Herbert has promised to do so and has issued an executive order to that effect.
A word or three about the genesis of the controversy are in order. In 2008, then-Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. got the bright idea that state government could save $3 million on overhead if it operated four days a week for 10 hours a day rather than the traditional five days a week for eight hours a day. Some state services would be exempt, but most state offices would operate Mondays through Thursdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
As it turned out, the savings were only about $1 million. Some state employees howled about having to change their schedules, but most adapted. The public liked state offices being open more hours so that people could visit them before or after traditional working hours. But some people chafed that offices weren't open on Fridays.
Gov. Herbert made adjustments to some offices, like those for driver licenses, that people demanded be open five days a week. But generally he held to the four-day schedule, promising to make further adjustments and opening more online services.
That wasn't good enough for Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, who wanted at least one physical office for each agency open five days a week, nine hours a day. That's what the new law requires. How to achieve that is left to agency administrators, but the bill does not provide the money to achieve its goal. It is, in other words, an unfunded mandate. Utah legislators hate those when the federal government imposes them. When Utah legislators impose them? Not so much.