Categories
life Local meta politics

Cleaning Up

I’ve been working on a blog for Becky Edwards, my state representative, that she wants to use to communicate with constituents. As part of that I have been looking at themes and plugins to help implement the features she is looking for. That led me to Subscribe2 which offers email subscription functionality through the blog. I have decided to try that out in place of feedblitz and see how it works. I figure it will be easier to tend on my own site.

I’m hoping that it is a positive experience for my few subscribers.

Categories
Local politics State

My Utah Lake Perspective

I obviously ruffled the feathers of one commenter when I wrote a post in support of a bridge over Utah Lake. He argues that those who want a lake bridge hate the lake and that we should instead be working to restore the lake to its natural beauty. I argue that building a bridge and restoring the lake are nearly independent issues and to that end I decided to share my position on what we should do to restore the lake.

First, I think that Utah Lake would be a great natural resource for the county and the state if it were restored. In its present condition it is little more than a big puddle interrupting our transportation and growth.

There are currently efforts to rid the lake of the carp that were introduced to the lake a century ago. I believe that is a crucial step to improving the beauty of the lake and I think the Department of Wildlife Resources should take every possible step to make that happen – some suggestions they could consider include offering a bounty to fishermen for every carp caught (and kept), making it illegal to release carp (like they have with burbot), or even trying to host a tournament for carp fishing as Texas has done. I’m not sure what the effects on other animals and plants of the ecosystem would be if they try poisoning the carp (as has been suggested).

When the carp have been contained we should be able to reintroduce cutthroat trout and nurse the June sucker populations back to sustainable levels. This would both improve the beauty of the lake, and increase the opportunities for tourism and recreational use of this natural resource.

None of this depends, or is hindered, by a lake bridge as far as I can see. Some have even argued that a lake bridge could be a toll road and that the tolls could be used to fund other lake improvements. The only conjunction I can see between the two issues is that the specific placement of a bridge might influence the recreational activities available on the lake.

Categories
Local politics

Followup on City Council Pay

Back in May I asked a question about attitudes regarding compensation for elected officials at the city level. I promised to write my conclusions in a followup and now I find that I never did that. My conclusion was that the issue deserved study in Lehi as the city grows so fast, that it should be done with lots of public input, and that the original request seemed very generous, especially for the mayor. Today I read in the Daily Herald:

Lehi officials are looking for public input on a proposal to increase their own salaries as much as several hundred dollars a month.

In May, Mayor Howard Johnson asked the council to triple his salary to a total of $51,000 a year, and to give themselves a raise too. At that time Council members instructed staff to form a committee of former council members to give a recommendation on salaries.

On Tuesday, Lehi city attorney Ken Rushton said the committee had met and had recommended raising Council salaries from $750 to $1,000 a month, and the mayor’s salary from $1,000 a month to $1,500.

In addition, the committee felt Council members should receive another $200 a month as a travel expense stipend, and the mayor an additional $500 per month.

So far I think the council has done a good job of addressing this issue. They have avoided any attempt to push for the large increases that the mayor suggested and in fact there is at least one council member who even believes that they should be reimbursed for travel rather than having stipends. (I would go one step further and have reimbursements with a cap – per trip and/or per month or year.) They have also done a good job so far of making the process open and inviting public input.

Categories
life Local politics

When Mandates Are Not Optional

I generally do not favor government action that places a mandate on citizens. I don’t believe that it is the place of government to decide whether citizens should recycle or not, but if the options are between mandatory recycling and no recycling option after the citizens have overwhelmingly favored optional recycling it makes sense for the city to choose mandatory recycling. This appears to be the case in Bountiful.

The motion to proceed from Council member Beth Holbrook rescinded the “opt-in” proposal passed May 27.

Reasons cited were a change by Allied Systems, the previously chosen provider. It wanted a guaranteed minimum participation level and a four-year contract, and would start charging the city to maintain the 200 West recycling bins, at an estimated cost of $30,000-$35,000 each year.

With a  price-tag of $3 per month I don’t think we’ll see too much protest over this. Of course my position might be affected by the fact that I have lived with mandatory recycling in Lehi for a few years and I liked it. We generally had more recyclable trash than we did regular garbage so I thought the service was very worthwhile.

Categories
Local politics

Advocating a Utah Lake Bridge

One of the things that is good about Editorial boards is that when they are right about something they usually do a good job of defining and defending their position and they have the power of the press at their disposal. (One of the problems is that they have all those advantages when they are wrong too.) A great example of that is the Daily Herald Editors putting the issue of a bridge over Utah Lake in perspective.

Local pressure groups are lining up to fight even thinking about the possibility of a bridge across Utah Lake. They might as well protest the heat of a Utah Valley summer. It’s inevitable that some kind of passage will be forged over the lake in coming years, and the most productive course would be to find the best feasible alternative that will serve the widest number of people.

When my close interest in the transportation issues of Utah County began, the idea of a lake bridge seemed like a distant possibility – something that might happen in 20 or 30 years if at all. Years of living there and following the issues easily have me convinced that the question of if a bridge should be built is short-sighted, the only real questions to answer are where, when, and how to do the job right.

No comprehensive plan to meet the growing transportation needs of Utah County can fail to include some route across the lake. Anyone who wants to delay or minimize a lake bridge had better approach their goal through community planning and business development in Cedar Valley. Only by lowering the overwhelming incentives to travel between that growing area and the established communities on the east side of the lake will allow for a more leisurely approach to designing the bridge that will still become necessary at some point in the future for economic and quality of life reasons.

One nice change in their rhetoric is that they no longer appear to lay the blame for this issue at the feet of Lehi City – like they did only 2 months ago.

Categories
Local politics

Increasing City Council Pay

The news that our mayor asked city council to raise his pay and theirs got me thinking about this issue more closely than I’ve ever thought about it before. It makes sense that it would be a sensitive issue, but even in the private sector I’m a bit leery of giving someone the power to set their own level of compensation with money from other people. Congress is a good example of the abuse of this power as they have set a system of automatic pay increases (every year as I recall) unless they take action to prevent the pay increase.

I’m not accusing our city council of anything even remotely like that but I wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts or experience with this type of issue that might help shape my position. I’m trying to balance fair compensation with maintaining the integrity of the public service aspect of serving in city government as an elected officer. I’ll share my position after I firm it up a bit. I plan to be talking with Johnny Revill (a member of our city council) about the issue since he lives near me.

Categories
Local politics

Re: Growth Will Force a Lake Bridge

It must be nice to be paid to publish your opinions – especially when there is nobody to dispute your position. With the power of the press you get to proclaim who is right and who is wrong, and you get to make your living taking the time to make a considered opinion not only about the right answer to current issues, but also to the best way to sell that position without regard to the truth. Such an attitude appears to be the driving force behind the Editorial Board of the Provo Daily Herald (DHEB) as they criticize Lehi city for what they see as the inevitability of a bridge across Utah Lake.

Using little more than their own words and logic from that one editorial it is clear that they are using Lehi as a scapegoat on an issue that is uncomfortable but which has no real villain.

Based on their words, only 17% of wage earners in Cedar Valley will be heading north for work in 2040. Would those headed East be very excited to drive to 2100 N in Lehi to travel to Provo/Orem just because it is a full freeway instead of a 6 or 8 lane arterial road (which it will undoubtedly be by 2040)?

The DHEB argues that there are “a dozen east-west corridors of five to seven lanes each” in Salt Lake County and only two in Utah County. If we compare apples to apples then we must recognize that the “measly two-lane compromise that Lehi forced on Utah County” is actually a 4 lane road (two lanes each direction) and will likely be at least 6 lanes within 15 years. That’s respectable compared to the 5 – 7 lane roads in Salt Lake County they are comparing it to as well as the 6 or 8 lane freeway that it is replacing. In addition, this compromise should be built in under 5 years rather than the 2100 N freeway which would not even be started for nearly 10 years. This early increase in capacity should allow for Main Street in Lehi to receive a long overdue widening as well so we could have an extra 10 east/west lanes within 15 years (not counting the 4 lanes at 1000 S. in Lehi). Between main street, 2100 N, and 1000 S, Lehi will have at least 14 east-west lanes for travel on the west side of I-15 – you could hardly expect more form a single city.

Do I expect that 14 lanes would be able to handle the traffic from 1/4 Million people expected to be in Cedar Valley? No. The real limitation on east-west travel in the county is that we have a lake spanning most of our north-south distance between our east and west side communities – why should the DHEB blame that on Lehi? The only possible solutions to that problem are a bridge over the lake or else a reduction in the necessity of east-west travel. Even the DHEB wording that this “will only hasten the construction of an east-west bridge across Utah Lake” is a reminder that such a bridge is a matter of when more than if. Is there any extra environmental impact if it is built 5 years earlier rather than 5 years later?

I find it ironic that it is the Mayor of Lehi, and not the DHEB, that has been talking for years about the need for a Cedar Valley highway (that DHEB is now calling an inevitability) and a lake bridge.

Categories
Local politics State

Outstanding News

The news today that UDOT puts Lehi freeway on hold is incredible.

Teri Newell of UDOT said the state agency, hearing concerns from Lehi, had agreed to cut in half the width of the road, going from 680 feet wide to something closer to 350 feet wide.

That plan will preserve a corridor wide enough to build a freeway if necessary, but beyond that, all bets are essentially off the table.

Newell said that “if” a freeway ever needs to be built — and that word alone represents a change in tone — UDOT has now agreed that negotiations must begin again at some future date . . . Instead of planning for a freeway now, a new east-west connector at 2100 North will be built as soon as possible, with two lanes and traffic signals in each direction.

I knew that the city officials had not given up on finding a resolution, and the article makes it clear that they still want to see a 2100 North freeway removed from the table of future possibilities, but I really had not expected that they would be able to make even this much progress with UDOT.

An east-west connector being built soon will do much more good for north-west Utah county than 10 more years of wrangling over the alignment without building anything. Combined with the east-west connector on 1000 South (where construction should begin sometime next year) we will have nearly the equivalent of a new east-west freeway, and 3 east-west routes (1000 S, Main, and 2100 N) through Lehi in 5 years rather than 10 more years of talk and gridlock – which is what we would have had before even if Lehi had not opposed the 2100 North freeway.

Kudos to the Lehi City officials who continued to advance the city’s interests in the face of long odds.

Categories
Local politics

Making Logical Rules

I’m sure that Leaders of the Utah County Republican Party hoped that their policy reversal would put this stupid move on delegate email distribution behind them. They have done the right thing now and released the delegate email lists to all Republican candidates but their excuse for the original action lies somewhere between lame and pathetic.

Monnahan had promised delegates she would keep their e-mail addresses private. At the caucus meetings, leaders declared the e-mail lists would be used only for internal party business.

That was a new policy. The party had provided delegate e-mail addresses to candidates in the past. Two longtime legislative district chairmen forgot the new rule when they got the delegate e-mail lists and handed them over to the Republican candidates in their district.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt and accept it as lame, but the cynic in me still holds out the possibility that it was a pathetic excuse for an underhanded attempt to swamp the challengers in the Republican primary.

Next time they want to try to save the delegates from unwanted solicitations they should write a policy that goes something like this:

  • If you are a delegate to the county convention your email address will only be given to candidates you will be choosing among at the county convention, and it will not be passed to the state party by us. If you are elected as a state delegate we will pass your email address to the state party, but not to the RNC.
  • We trust our candidates not to engage in shady practices against faithful party members whose votes they are trying to win, and we trust our delegates to be smart enough to recognize when a candidate is not fit to represent our party.
Categories
Local meta politics State

Party Shenanigans

I would think that people who are politically involved enough to be elected as delegates and precinct chairs for the Republican party would want to be contacted by candidates so that they could choose who they would support. That is at odds with the assertion that the Utah County Republican Party promised not to give the emails of their delegates to the candidates. The water becomes extra murkey in light of the fact that there is evidence that some candidates do appear to have those email addresses. Kip Meacham has links about this as it develops plus his own experience as a precinct chair. The story is also being followed at Out of Context. This is definitely a case where people need to keep the issue in the public eye and put pressure on the party to not interfere with a fair political process – if some candidates have the email addresses then they should be released to all Republican candidates.

If delegates do not want to hear from candidates then they should not accept the position of being delegates – but I don’t think that’s what is happening here. If candidates want to try spamming the delegates to win the primary then I think the delegates are smart enough to vote against those candidates at the convention – but I don’t think that’s what’s really happening here either. Maybe it’s my own personal bias here, but this seems like exactly the type of thing I would expect from a party that has no significant opposition (meaning another solid party to counter them) which has grown accustomed to simply dictating who will come before the citizens on the ballot for their perfunctory approval.

I sure hope to see the Utah County Democrats grow to the point that they can regularly get their candidates elected – forcing the county Republican party to stop talking and start listening. We also need to see more active Republicans like Kip who will stand up to their party and say publicly that this is unacceptable.