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Show Of! JL f?. Utah's Thirtieth Legislature passed the half-way mark in its 60 day session Tuesday, but was far from being half way through the business 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 tax refund matters. mat-ters. The reduced income tax is all set up, including an extension of the filing date to April 15. The new short form is the main bill, it providing a straight across exemption ex-emption of $600 per individual and a deduction of ten per cent or a listing of federal income tax deductions de-ductions again 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 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 thru the House all right, but several Republicans voted against it after learning that Governor J. Bracken Lee intends to veto the measure 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 the time on reapportionment. re-apportionment. That issue is still red hot, and there are many who insist that anything that passes one house will fail to pass the other and that the present make j up of 60 representatives and 23 senators will remain after the session is over in March. Should that be so, according to Sen. Rendell N. Mabey (R-Davis), the people (likely spearheaded "by those in his county) will reapportion reappor-tion by referendum. He says the 10,000 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. citi-zens. In the hope they might get some sort of workable plan 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 popul-ation and the other based on area. Under this plan, advocated by Sen. Orval Hafen (R-St. George), 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 results will be the same. And there is always the plarr to set up one Senator for each county, patterned after the U.S. Congress. But, with the session half gone, the big issues still remain. The House has passed the controversial controver-sial Sunday closing law, which would allow sale of tobacco but not bread, soft diinks but no beer, milk but no groceries. After a stormy public hearing the Senate still has the bill in committee and its future, as the time runs out, is rather uncertain. Yet to come up are varied plans 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 mun-icipalities to set up programs for clearing up stream pollution and building sewage disposal and 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 up its report, and the powerful j "joint appropriation committee, j which must figure out where the money is to come from and how j much will be spent for what pur- ! poses. j No one, especially the legisla- j tors, know how big a need there will be for public school facilities. 1 Sources close to the 60 man com- 1 mission say the demands will be ! far more moderate than most have i predicted. But even the most 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 school no additional relief or cutting down all along the line in other fields. No matter what happens, two facts have emerged from the first 30 days. One, Gov. Lee has been given his tax cut. And, two, the most interesting inter-esting and perplexing part of the 1953 session still lies before the legislators. |
