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Show Under The Capitol Dome By Harry Marlowe The Utah Legislature hit the half-way point in the 1955 lawmaking law-making activities this week, still with a pretty good batting average. aver-age. The legislators still have the "big ones" before them. But the indications are that, before too much longer, the House will have hammered out some decision on reapportionment, one of the "major "ma-jor issues." The Senate will also have taken tak-en action before too long, maybe by the time this is read, on the explosive matter of the "right to work" bill, passed by the House. That will leave only two big questions unanswered, although a lot of smaller matters will have to be settled. The big questions will be "How much can the state spend during the next two years?" and "Where will the state get the money?" The joint appropriations committee com-mittee is getting its work cut down to size and the preliminary reports indicate their final result unless the state embarks on a really ambitious building program will not be far from the $69.2 million suggested by Governor J. Bracken Lee. . Meanwhile, there are a whole series of bills designed to reshuffle re-shuffle the state's tax picture which are being held back until appropriations group come through with their recommendations. The lawmakers have : been forced for-ced to cut down a bit on the fast pace of the early weeks of the session. But they still have a big advantage over most sessions. For one thing, although the calendars of both the House and Senate are clogged most of the committee commit-tee work has been done.. For another thing, some action or some indications of action, have come on almost all of the big issues of the session. One more thing is to the advantage ad-vantage of the 1955 lawmakers. T They have received all the bills they are going to get barring the usual few submitted late and introduced in-troduced by unanimous consent. The only thing which has slowed slow-ed up the streamlined processes this much is the apparent reluctance reluc-tance of the lawmakers to face realistically their biggest problem the biennial rush of minor bills. And, as usual, there is the smattering of bills backed by political pol-itical sub-divisions which ask the state to set up, by state law, ordinances or-dinances and statutes which the individual sub-divisions of government govern-ment could themselves set up by local ordinances. But, from all indications during the first half of the sessions, the 1955 session will be one of the better sessions in recent state history. |