They also wanted a hate crime law, a new program to treat drug offenders, and they favored giving police authority to pull over adult motorists for not wearing a seat belt.

Their elected leaders didn't deliver on those priorities.

But on most issues, the Utah Legislature acted in accord with the views of a majority of Utahns, according to a pre-session poll commissioned by The Salt Lake Tribune. Lawmakers followed the popular sentiment on seven issues and went their own way on four.

It was a better showing than last year, when a similar comparison showed the Legislature went with the public opinion half the time, while opposing a third of the items in a 2004 Tribune poll. Some issues were inconclusive.

This year, they backed the public in voting against tuition tax credits, hotter radioactive waste and marriagelike rights for those unable to wed. Lawmakers also repealed driver licenses for undocumented immigrants, while adding a new twist in creating a limited "driving privilege card."

They kept a clean-air law exemption for smokers to light up in bars and agreed to an age-based fee on recreational vehicles. Lawmakers also shied from an unpopular proposal to get rid of "no-fault" divorces, sending the issue to further study.

But other publicly backed issues didn't pass muster with lawmakers.

Take the proposed hate crimes law. More than 64 percent of the 600 Utahns surveyed Jan. 3-5 by Valley Research favored passing a law to toughen penalties when a crime is directed at an ethnic, racial or religious minority or a gay person.

The Legislature didn't let the bill out of committee and, in fact, killed it a second time when it resurfaced.

House Minority Leader Ralph Becker says that is not representative democracy.

"We need to reflect where we are as a society," says the Salt Lake City Democrat.

Sandy Peck, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Utah, says the difference in budget priorities shows the public doesn't always get what it wants.

"The public understands that education is a little bit more urgent than highways," Peck says.

But lawmakers say while they may not agree with the majority of residents on everything, there are solid reasons behind their decisions.

"In a representative democracy you're always one step removed from the immediate temperament of the public," says Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem. "The public oftentimes has only part of the overall picture. . . . They may not [see] the problems that legislators see."

House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander, R-Provo, echoes that, questioning whether people always grasp what is really happening on Capitol Hill. "Is it really the societal desire? You can say polls say something, but mostly, they don't understand what the legislation says."

When it came to budget priorities, lawmakers found themselves flush with more cash than expected. The Tribune poll asked residents where they would spend most of $370 million in new state revenue, but lawmakers actually ended up with tens of millions of dollars more. Whether the public's spending priorities would change when presented with more money is unclear.

What is certain is that lawmakers forked out about the same amount of new money for buildings as for education and tossed $120 million extra toward transportation.

Common Cause of Utah's executive director, Anthony Musci, says some differences are to be expected between elected leaders and residents.

"I don't expect lawmakers to always fall in line with the majority of their constituents," Musci says. "Lawmakers do have an opportunity to get information that the public at large may not have access to."

Musci doesn't want to say lawmakers are out of touch, but "obviously there's a dark side to that and the dark side is that lawmakers are largely beholden to large contributors to their campaign, to their [political] parties. I think there's an issue of who they're really representing."

This year, legislators aligned themselves most of the time with the people who put them in office. "It's not terribly surprising to me," says Quin Monson, assistant director of Brigham Young University's Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. "And it's consistent to what's happened in previous years."

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Tribune reporter Rebecca Walsh contributed to this story.