Ugh…when the legislature is in session it is sometimes difficult to do a happy post.
I don’t think I can beat this one tonight so I’m not even going to try.
Thank you Mark at BCC. That was my favorite read of the week.
UPDATE 03/02/08 9:41 PM: Jason picked up on the “Happy Post” meme and knocked one out of the park. Comic irony nearly always equals a Happy Post!
Full Personal Disclosure: I am currently employed by the Davis County Assessor Office as a Certified Residential Appraiser. This blog post represents my own opinion only.
KVNU’s For The People blog posted the entirety of an article by the Utah Foundation explaining Utah’s property tax system and how it works.
Utah’s “Truth in Taxation” property tax law has proven to be an excellent restriction on the growth of this tax for Utahns. Every home or business owner should read the Utah Foundation’s brief on how it works.
Are there steps that could be taken to ensure Utah’s property tax burden is distributed more fairly? Definitely.
1. Counties should be required to re-assess every parcel within their borders every year to ensure problems like those in the 2007 assessment of southern Davis County don’t happen again. Obviously this would require that assessor offices in each of the counties be adequately funded and staffed.
2. Utah’s status as a non-disclosure state for real estate transactions needs to be changed. All property sales should be public record as is the standard in nearly every other state in our country. The current system ensures an unfair tax break for high-end properties and a higher tax burden for owners of average or smaller homes.
3. Better enforcement or revamping of greenbelt exemptions should be examined. Many large property owners and developers are bearing far less than their fair share of the tax burden because they take advantage of greenbelt status.
4. The availability of circuit breaker property tax exemptions for destitute home owners should be expanded. We shouldn’t hear of people being taxed out of their homes in our state because of increasing property taxes.
Thanks for KVNU/FTP and the Utah Foundation for some excellent and useful information!
Sen. Buttars came out against his own bill (mentioned a couple times on this site) because it would make an incredibly dumb law.
I’d love to know where the change of heart is coming from. It is possible that he truly didn’t understand its implications when he sponsored and has now seen the light it but I doubt that is the case. It is more likely that this is part of his damage control process after several bad “public relations” moves.
In the end it doesn’t really matter. Kudos to Sen. Buttars for putting this bill out of its misery. It really was an ugly one.
H/T Senate Site (Note: The Senate Site’s “Morning Workout” posts are a really cool way of following news on the legislative process. I follow the links every day. Thank you SS!)
Yeah…I’ve got it and its nasty. I haven’t been around everyone’s favorite militant progressive at all lately but his symptoms sound like what I’ve got. It stinks.
Since I’m tired and miserable I’m only going to link to other people today and call that fulfilling my blogging responsibilities:
Bob Rules. Sign the petition.
Paramaphil thinks Sen. Margaret Dayton is worse than Buttars when it comes to stupid racist statements. He makes a great argument. Who would have thought someone would say something even more stupid than the “black baby” comment.
For The People catches Sen. Buttars in a lie.
David at Pursuit of Liberty links to an excellent description of why the free traders are right and Lou Dobbs is an idiot.
Frank Staheli thinks American militarism is expanding in a very real and scary way. As usual he’s right.
RudiZink points out that the legislature is owned lock stock and barrel by real estate developers who would sell their own mothers for a little more easy month. We should spend a little less time focusing on fools like Sen. Buttars and more focusing on the blatant corruption on display daily from the legislature. Thank you WCF.
Utah may have its problems…but our local blogosphere rocks.
The NAACP and others who are opposed to Sen. Buttars agenda have so focused on trying to take advantage of the Senator’s stupid comments that they’ve turned him into a hero for Utahns who are sick of having to worry all the time about political correctness and multi-cultural hyper-sensitivity.
If Sen. Buttars were really a malignant racist don’t you think he’d be the one proclaiming real racism from the rooftops like he does his bigotry against homosexuals? He’s never shown himself to be shy about sharing his real thoughts on any topic.
Now the left has turned him into a hero for those in Utah (and there are a lot of them) who think society already focuses too much on political correctness. I predict that Buttars will become a hero not just to the looneys at Eagle Forum but to most active Utah Republicans because of the persecution he’s receiving over some obviously dumb and insensitive but generally harmless slips of the tongue.
Think I’m wrong? Spend an hour or so looking at the comment thread (300+ comments) on this KSL story about the NAACP being offended at Sen. Buttars. If the NAACP wanted to make itself even more irrelevant in our state their overplaying of the political hand they’ve been dealt in this case is the perfect way to do it.
I won’t be posting much here over the next few days.
I’ll be doing my small part to help out at Utah Amicus while Rob Miller is gone. He’s spending time away from blogging fulfilling his responsibilities as Utah Democratic Party Vice Chair. I’ll try to provide links on this site to all the posts I do there.
Mayor Becker thinks Sen. Buttar’s bill to make police misconduct confidential is a great idea. Apparantly Salt Lake County already has this policy for their police officers and Becker’s SL City officers want the same deal.
Becker is every bit as wrong to support this as Sen. Buttars.
Police who don’t answer for misconduct are a bigger risk to Utah’s citizens than the criminals they are charged to detain.
UPDATE: 2/14/08 2:25 PM: Glen Warchol just posted his take on this development. He’s exactly right.
The new Star Wars movies kind of ruined the whole franchise for me (either that or I’m just older now). This has me so excited I almost cried when I saw it. Here’s hoping May 22nd won’t be a let down.
I’m willing to take Sen. Buttars at his word that his comments yesterday weren’t intended as a racial slur. They sure sounded bad and don’t contribute to helping the image of Utahns as being a tolerant people who can accept others who are different. Even so I think it was a case of someone talking without engaging their brain. I don’t think Sen. Buttars meant his remark as a malicious commentary about skin color.
We have enough examples of our Republican legislature’s racial bigotry and general intolerance of people who are different here, here, and here without having to contrive offense at comments that the speaker claims weren’t meant in the way we’re choosing to frame them.
I saw my dentist on TV this morning offering free dental work for people who can’t afford to pay for it. We need more people like him who are willing to actually do something on their own to solve the problems our society faces instead of turning to government for solutions.
Thank you Dr. Preece. A great dentist and a great example.
I just started reading the comments on this KSL story about the House voting down driving privilege cards for illegal immigrants. I was a little shocked at how many people think taking these permits away is a good idea.
None of the first dozen or so comments that I’ve read so far mentioned the rationale Donnelson claimed motivated him to draft his bill:
Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R-North Ogden, said the cards are a threat to national security and encourage illegal immigrants to settle in Utah.
“With the driver privilege card, we do not know who they are,” Donnelson said. “Are they terrorists? Are they just people who want to come here to work? We don’t know.”
Who does Donnelson think he’s kidding? “Are they terrorists?” What? Has there been a rash of car bombings in North Ogden I haven’t heard about? Of course they aren’t terrorists. All I can take from his statement is that Rep. Donnelson thinks we are all either stupid enough to think there really is a national security concern or that we are just racist enough that we won’t call him on his idiotic assertion.
I’d like to hear a good argument for why penalizing these people is worth increasing our auto insurance premiums and making our roads less safe. I don’t think there is one.
UPDATE 02/12/2008 10:09 PM: Sen. Buttars, you’re not helping.
Why would Sen. Buttars propose a bill that would make police officer misconduct confidential? I’d love to give the guy the benefit of the doubt every once in a while but when he pulls moves as obviously stupid and bad for Utah as this…its hard.
Here is the text of SB260
Our police are given a near monopoly on the use of force in our society. Their use of that monopoly keeps us safe and it is a great arrangement. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need safeguards in place to protect the people from misuse of police power. This misuse happens all over our country on a regular basis. We don’t need to make it easier to hide. Its all pretty simple really. Anyone who would want to make police misconduct easy to hide is either very confused or working some agenda. Either way Utahns will suffer if Sen. Buttars has his way.
I’d recommend that Sen. Buttars and everyone else read The Agitator on a regular basis. Radley Balko has done a great job cataloguing police misconduct across the country. It happens all the time and Americans are more powerless than ever in fighting it. We don’t need people making things even worse in our state.
UPDATE 2/11/08 10:53: I just saw that Ethan is already covering Sen. Buttars poor legislating this session. Props.
A Mississippi legislator proposed a message bill he knew would fail in an effort to “shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi.” His bill would require that restaurants turn away the obese rather than serve them.
Right now bills like this are just used to raise awareness. When taxpayers become responsible for paying each others medical bills under the socialized healthcare plans proposed by some politicians ideas like this will be taken more seriously as efforts to save taxpayer money.
H/T Boing Boing
Last night was a wake-up call for economically conservative Republicans. They are but a small minority of their own party and their party has little reason to respect them.
Nearly 90% of Utah’s Republican voters voted for Mitt Romney. While many likely cast a ballot for Romney because he is LDS those who supported Romney because they thought he was the only real small government conservative option now know that they are the least important segment of their party behind the economic moderates/liberals who are foreign policy hawks (neoconservatives) and the religious right.
I abandoned the Republican party because I saw this happening quite a while ago. It will be interesting to see what happens to Republicans after they get smashed in the general election (and there is little doubt that they will be utterly smashed). The knowledge everyone should take away from this primary election is that economic conservatism is less popular with voters than it ever has been since Ronald Reagan. As much as I hate the Republican party this development is really disheartening. There doesn’t seem to be a sizeable small-government constituency any more. That is really bad.
UPDATE 2/06/08 10:44: It looks like participants at this Sutherland Institute gathering came to roughly the same conclusion about Republicanism in Utah as I have about Republicanism nationally. Small government conservatism just doesn’t seem to be a governing principle for most Republicans.
H/T Senate Site
UPDATE 2/06/08 2:48 PM: Mick Stockinger makes a good argument for the case that it is all about identity politics…not the issues. I still think Republicans who stick with their party hoping for small government conservatism are deluded but Mick’s point that voters don’t care about the issues in elections makes a ton of sense.
