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Show Economy Attitude of Gov Lee Felt at Statehouse By Harry Marlowe The Utah Legislature passed the quarter mark in its 60-day 1951 session this week without the slightest indication of what direction it intends to take in the all-important matter of state spending. This might be due largely to the "economy" attitude of Gov. J. Bracken Lee, who definitely will have the final say on legislative legis-lative activities with a "veto" power that is in no apparent danger of overrides. He has 30 Republicans in the House of Representatives Rep-resentatives to match the 30 Democrats and fair support among the Democrats who hold a 15-8 majority In the Senate. Already two Democrats, Sen. Marl D., Gibson (D-Price) and Clarence L. Ashton (D-Roosevelt) have joined three Republicans to sponsor two bills sent up by the governor to exempt most food and prescription drugs from sales tax and to provide income tax relief by raising personal income tax exemptions. The governor proposes exemptions be raised from $600 to 750 on single persons, per-sons, from $1200 to $1500 on married couples, and from $300, to $500 on dependents. In his opening message to the Legislature, the chief executive tions of higher learning. While the governor was seeking seek-ing a cut in general fund spending, spend-ing, including a cut o $100,000; in appropriation to the State De- partment of Public Instruction,1 to effect the proposed tax reduc-tion, reduc-tion, however, lawmakers proposed pro-posed in another measure intro- duced at the close of the second week an increase in basic public school revenues that may mean a hike in the property tax over the state. The latter measure, introduced in the Senate by ten members of the body, would raise the operation opera-tion and maintenance cost of a classroom unit per year from $3300 to $3800. With a total of 5754 classroom units in the state, this would mean that another $2,877,000 would have to be raised to cover the uniform school fund cost. An additional increase from $675,000 to $1,000,000 for transportation trans-portation of school children is sought, and that would extend the income and corporation and franchise tax collections, the land board collections on school property prop-erty and surpluses are counted up each year and that after that, the remaining amount necessary to finance the basic school program pro-gram comes from a combined state-district property tax levy, uniform over the state. It should be noted that Governor Gov-ernor Lee, in his plea for income tax reduction, said a general 'fund suralus could be tossed into the recommended the tax reductions and that further reductions be made in costs of department operations op-erations to fit his "economy" program. pro-gram. This week he continued his pruning efforts in a proposed cost slashing budget. It was presented pre-sented along with a message in which he emphasized that "our primary obligation is not to certain individuals or pressure groups, but rather to the people as a whole, including the heavily-burdened taxpayer." He recommended that "we provide pro-vide some measure of tax relief to the people and then fit appropriations ap-propriations to expected revenues." reve-nues." In this regard, he presented pre-sented a proposed budget in which he fitted department and institutional appropriations to an estimated general fund, including in-cluding surplus from 1949-51 of $15,058,000. This meant slashing down requests of $25,248,000, including in-cluding some $14,880,000 asked by vocational schools and institu- school fund to eliminate necessity necessi-ty of a property tax increase at the present rate of $3300 per classroom unit. Meanwhile, in action so far, the legislature has looked to the rural areas by passing a measure to permit creation of fire protection protec-tion districts within and between counties. It also passed a bill to raise pay of lawmakers from $300 to $500 a year. In addition to taxation matters, the problem of reapportionment appeared likely to present itself. One bill already has appeared in the Senate. That would provide for two senators from each of the presently constituted 15 Senatorial Sen-atorial districts and a realignment realign-ment of representatives on the basis of one for each 10,000 in habitants as in the present law. This would decrease Salt Lake County representatives in the Senate from seven to two, would leave Utah and Weber at two each and increase all other districts dis-tricts from one to two, with the membership increasing from 23 to 30. House membership would jump from 60 to 76, with Salt Lake County the big gainer, going go-ing from 19 to 28 members. Eleven senators sponsored the bill, which is one less than a majority. Senator Gibson was the only senator outside of Salt Lake, Utah and Weber counties not on the measure. It is generally gener-ally conceded that Carbon Coun-' ty representation will hold the key to the entire reapportionment reapportion-ment problem. |