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Show Under The A Hi of promoting state tourist trade, the entire round of requested salary sal-ary increases, the proposed new public health code, the proposed fish and game code, flood control, a raft of traffic safety proposals and provisions for enabling municipalities muni-cipalities to set up programs for clearing up stream pollution and building sewage disposal and also treatment plants. As the legislators round the turn into the backstretch, most of them are casting apprehensive glances toward the big public school survey sur-vey commission, just now finishing finish-ing up its report and the powerful joint appropriation committee, which must figure out where the money is to come from and how much will be spent for what "purposes. "pur-poses. No one, especially the legislators, legisla-tors, know how big a need there will be for public scsool facilities Sources close to the 60-man commission com-mission say the demands will' be far more moderate than most have predicted. But even the most moderate mod-erate prediction yet heard by the legislators has been in the neighborhood neigh-borhood of $5,000,000.00. If such a demand materializes, legislators will be faced with a choice of either giving the schools no additional relief or cutting down all along the line in other fieldj. No matter what happens, two facets have emerged from the first 30 days. ' One, Gov. Lee has, been given his tax cut. And, two, the most interesting and perplexing part of the 1953 session still lies before the legislators. Utah's Thirtieth Legislature has passed the half-way mark in its 60-dav session, but is far from being' haU'-way through the business bus-iness before it. In fact, just about everything that presents any kind of an issue has either been delayed or has not reached the floor of either body as yet. Exceptions are the income tax reduction and gas refund matters. The reduced income tax is all set up including an extension of the fili'n? date to April 15. The new short form is the main bill, its providing pro-viding a straight across exemption exemp-tion of $600 per individual and a deduction of ten percent or a listing list-ing of federal income tax deductions deduc-tions against gross income. In addition the federal income tax paid can be deducted. As to the gas tax refund for off-highway use gas, it was killed this session in the House. Death-came Death-came after a long controversy in which some members tried to attach at-tach the issue to a proposed hike of one-cent in the tax on gasoline. The gas tax increase went on through the House all right, but several Republicans voted against it after learning that Gov. J. Bracken Brac-ken Lee intends to veto the measure mea-sure if and when it reaches him. The Senate has yet to work on the matter. The Senate in fact, has yet to work on many matters. It has spent most of its time on reapportionment. reappor-tionment. That issue is still red-hot Sen. Rendell N. Mabey (R-Davis), the people (likely spearheaded by those in his county) will reapportion reappor-tion by referendum. He says the 40,000 residents of his county are getting no more representation with a single senator ,and single representative than districts of far less than a tenth that many citizens. In the hope they might get some sort of workable pain for dividing up the representation in the two houses, the Senate finally ' did agree on a basic policy to follow setting up membership in one house on the basis of population and the other based on area!"" Under this plan, advocated by Sen. Orval Hafen (R-St. eGorge), the rural areas would get preference prefer-ence in the Senate and the urban region in the House. Sen. Mabey has a somewhat different plan, but the end result will be the same. And there is always the plan to set up one Senator for each county, patterned pattern-ed after the U. S. Congress. But, with the session half gone, the big issues still remain. The House has passed the controversal Sunday closing law, which would allow sale of tobacco but not breat, soft drinks but no beer, milk but no groceries. After a stormy public hearing, the-ISenate still has the bill in committee and its future, fu-ture, as the time runs out, is rather uncertain. Yet to come up are varied plans and there are many who insist that anything that passes one house will fail to pass the other and that the present make up of 60 representatives and 23 senators will remain after the session is over in March. . Should that be so, according to |