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Show Wallace Gardner Speaks to Council Meeting Recently Fresh from a special legislative legis-lative session which adjourned at 2 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 3, Senator Wallace H. Gardner, R-Spanish Fork, kept a 9:30 a. m. appointment to speak to the Women's Legislative Council in Provo the same morning. The senator said the reapportionment reap-portionment bill which held the session over was concluded finally fin-ally to give Utah 20 senators and 75 members in the house. He also reviewed several main bills which were passed or defeated de-feated in the 39th legislative budget session. The retirement and health bill for public employees em-ployees was passed with certain cer-tain conditions. The mill levy will remain as it is, and the proposed $15 million bonding bill for recreation didn't get out cf committee, he said. Senator Gardner said great care must be taken in accepting accept-ing government funds. For instance, in-stance, he explained that $6 million was given to Utah for "planning" a manpower training train-ing program and $4 million for "planning" a police protection program. "Planning is fine," he said, "but we need to work our plan. We can better decide in Utah how and where to use funds." As chairman of the Joint Appropriations Ap-propriations Committee for the fifth consecutive session, Senator Sen-ator Gardner explained the workings of the steering committee com-mittee which consists of 36 members, 18 from each party, and is broken down into nine sub-committees. This committee commit-tee reviews the governor's annual an-nual budget proposal for the coming year. Utah's total budget bud-get for next year is $591 million, mil-lion, he said, with $270,540,000 as the state's portion. The two main programs in Utah are the general fund and uniform school fund. He closed his comments by saying that the State of Utah is in good financial condition, but cautioned the voters that we could be ruined in short order or-der if we let our imaginations and desires run away with us. The meeting was under the direction of Mrs. Frank Jones, Lehi, president, with Mrs. Ethel Eth-el Allen, Orem, chairman of the program. |