Forty-five days after it began, the state Legislature has closed up shop for another year. They passed more than 500 bills and rejected hundreds more. Here are a handful of the most significant.
Polygamy
What to do about polygamy has vexed Utah since before statehood. This session, the Utah Legislature passed a bill to all but decriminalize polygamy among consenting adults.
SB102 reduces such polygamy to an infraction — an offense less than some traffic tickets. Polygamists who commit frauds or abuses can still be charged with a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The sponsor, Sen. Deidre Henderson, said she wanted to codify prosecutors’ existing policy of not charging consenting adults in order to ease concerns that reporting crimes like sex abuse won’t invite broader police scrutiny upon polygamous households.
One anti-polygamist opposed to the bill, Angela Kelly, of the Sound Choices Coalition, offended Rep. Sandra Hollins, a Democrat from Salt Lake City and the first African American woman to serve in the Utah Legislature, and her colleagues. During a Feb. 14 minority caucus meeting, Kelly attempted to compare the loss of identity within polygamy to that experienced by blacks during slavery and handed Hollins a label that read “slave.”
Gov. Gary Herbert has indicated he will sign the bill.
— Nate Carlisle
Abortion
The abortion fight raged on multiple fronts this session, with a trio of bills that aimed to restrict the procedure or even ban it entirely.
Anti-abortion advocates say their movement is experiencing a renewed vigor, as turnover in the Supreme Court has brought new justices more sympathetic to their cause.
Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say Utahns are tired of the ever-growing list of state mandates for the procedure, pointing to a recent poll that showed less than a third want new restrictions. Even some Republican lawmakers have voiced exhaustion over the stream of proposed prohibitions — pushback that culminated when Utah’s six female senators, both Democrat and Republican, walked out of a vote on mandatory ultrasounds.
HB364 would require a woman to get a sonogram before an abortion and for the technician or physician handling the imaging to show her the video and make audible the fetal heartbeat, if possible. It died awaiting final House action.
Lawmakers approved SB174 this session, a bill that would ban all elective abortions in Utah if the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe v. Wade, while a third, SB67, would require medical facilities to cremate or bury fetal remains after an abortion or miscarriage.
— Bethany Rodgers
Homelessness & affordable housing
As the dust settles on a major restructuring of the homeless services system in the Salt Lake City area, anti-poverty advocates were cheered by approval of $10 million to address the state’s lack of affordable housing — though much less than the $35.3 million the sponsor originally sought.
The three new homeless resource centers that replaced The Road Home’s emergency shelter in the downtown Rio Grande area late last year were sold on the promise that they would provide more services to people experiencing homelessness and better move them off the streets for good.
But that’s proved more difficult than expected in a state that has an estimated shortfall of nearly 55,000 affordable homes statewide, and the shelters have been almost consistently at capacity since they opened.
SB39 is expected to help stem that tide and also to serve low-income residents who Sen. Jake Anderegg, the bill’s sponsor, said last month are "legitimately one life event away from being homeless.”
Also on the homelessness front, Rep. Kim Coleman, R-West Jordan, attempted this year to establish a central leader, or ‘czar,’ to oversee the state’s direction on homelessness. She argued that such a move would promote accountability and responsibility in efforts to address the issue around the state.
But the bill, pushed by members of the Pioneer Park Coalition, was deeply unpopular among homeless service providers, who came out in force to voice their objections. After passing through the House with a 41-32 vote, a watered-down version of HB394 appeared Thursday morning and failed in the Senate with just minutes before the midnight adjournment.
— Taylor Stevens
Redistricting
With passage of SB200 to repeal and replace the voter-approved anti-gerrymandering reform, Proposition 4, lawmakers finished a hat trick that began in 2018 with the successful passage of three ballot initiatives.
Proposition 2 on medical marijuana, and Proposition 3 on Medicaid expansion, were quickly repealed by legislators in 2018 and 2019, and replaced with more restrictive legislation.
If Gov. Gary Herbert signs SB200 — which he has indicated he will do — the state law creating an independent redistricting commission will be altered to loosen the rules around political map-drawing, while keeping a version of the independent panel intact.
The legislation eliminates a requirement in the initiative that the Legislature take an up-or-down vote on the independent group’s maps and publicly explain any decision to reject them.
It also does away with a ban on the commission drawing boundaries to protect incumbents or promote a political party. Instead, the bill contains a looser provision requiring the commission to craft its own internal rules “prohibiting the purposeful or undue favoring or disfavoring” of parties or candidates.
The changes in SB200 were endorsed as by Better Boundaries, the group that sponsored Prop 4, as the culmination of months of private negotiations with legislators. And Rebecca Chavez-Houck, the group’s executive director, said she looks forward to seeing the work of the redistricting commission next year.
“The compromise wasn’t perfect, but good policy is all about give and take,“ she said.
— Benjamin Wood
Tax reform
As promised, lawmakers repealed the much-despised tax reform package, including a sales tax hike on groceries, they approved in a December special session. And they did it in the first days of the session.
Then they went to work behind the scenes.
In private talks, legislators won over key education groups on the idea of amending the decades-old constitutional lockbox that reserved income tax revenue for education. The Legislature sees SJR9 as key to keeping up with noneducation funding needs that have been stunted because most revenue growth has occurred in the income tax and not the sales tax that pays for virtually all other state programs.
In exchange lawmakers agreed to pony up a 6% increase in school funding this year and laws promising the budget will cover inflationary and student enrollment growth in the future.
Voters will have final say on this deal in November. But with no organized opposition in sight it may be a much easier sell than if school advocates — especially teachers — campaigned against it.
— Dan Harrie
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