Brian’s Utah Weblog

I went to my Community Council meeting tonight.  If you’re in Salt Lake City or the unincorporated county, you should really attend your local meeting (times and places under “Chairs and Boundaries”).   I heard about new parks, emergency preparedness, what the city council is doing, neighborhood celebrations, and volunteer opportunities.  There was direct access to elected officials and city employees.  It was a good time with nice people and fun topics.

I did hear a disturbing story from the police department.  This morning there were several calls about a carjacking downtown in broad daylight.  Our local community representative cop was in the area and observant enough to catch sight of the car and follow it.  She called for backup and chased the car across the city.  Meanwhile reports were saying the perp had used an AK-47 rifle in the carjacking which he still had.  Six cops made a guns-drawn arrest and no one was hurt.  The carjackers had drugs with them but the guns turned out to be realistic looking BB guns.

The car was registered to a nonexistent person and the owner never called in.  What had happened is that a drug dealer had carjacked another drug dealer with a “throw away” car that couldn’t be traced.  The drugs had belonged to the original dealer and the carjacker wanted them.

But with no owner to press charges and the drugs impossible to link to the carjacker, the only charges that are likely to stand up in court are red light running during the chase.  At least twenty hours of police work and a downtown chase and these drug dealers are going to get a slap on the wrist.

Reports indicate that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has offered recently reelected corrupt Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-LA) old seat on the Ways And Means committee to Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL).  Thanks to Pelosi and Davis for helping to establish that there is one party in this nation where bribery is unacceptable.  Maybe New Orleans will follow the same policy someday.

I’m here at the joint Executive Appropriations Committee meeting of the Utah Legislature and the room is packed. I had to help move spare chairs into the room in order to get a seat.

The official guest roll indicates there are quite a lot of Wasatch Front Regional Council members and representatives and city officials as well as UDOT leaders looking for news and influence over the transit bond diversion process.

First order of business is approving revenue estimates from fiscal years 2007 and 2008.

Representatives of the Wasatch Front Regional Council are testifying to the committee on proposed weighted criteria for transportation processes. WFRC Executive Director Chuck Chapel is testifying while West Valley City Mayor Dennis Nordfelt and Draper Mayor Darrell Smith sit with him.

Chapel is discussing UDOT’s TIP process for ranking projects and USDOT’s ideas about similar processes. He claims the technical requirements of the law have been met by the process he is proposing.

There is a question before the committee on having the legislature update weightings of the criteria or amend the criteria themselves. Speaker Curtis sounds like he wants to change the standards. Chapel stands up for Salt Lake County and notes that the law specifies only WFRC can create a weighting and the legislature can approve or disapprove but not amend. Curtis is pressing him pretty hard and asks him why he hasn’t noted where other committee members’ suggestions might be illegal, but of course other committee members haven’t proposed illegal changes.

Curtis is still trying to get Chapel to agree that the committee can demand amendments to the criteria.

There is some discussion over differences between House and Senate procedure in the committee. “It’s going to be a long 45 days,” says one legislator.

Now it sounds like the WFRC is giving in to Speaker Greg Curtis on the process and influence of the committee under law. “I thought I knew how to read a statute but I didn’t.” The committee suggests that they will demand changes in the criteria now that they have browbeaten the WFRC representatives into accepting the possibility of changing them.

Curtis is trying to establish that WFRC will follow his demands and accept the committee’s reordering. He asks if the WFRC agrees with his new understanding of the process. “Is that your understanding?” “It is now,” answers the WFRC representative.

The changes proposed by the committee that approval will depend on are,

• rankings for each criteria be scaled
• rankings be relative to cost
• cost effectiveness be ranked matched to congestion relief

I’ll write about the practical effects of that after I understand them.

Looks like only Rep. McGee, Sen. Mayne, Sen. Hale, and Sen. Dmitrich opposed the attempt of the committee to manipulate the criteria. All but Dmitrich are from Salt Lake. It doesn’t look promising

Before the November election the Utah Legislature met in special session to authorize Salt Lake and Utah counties to issue transit bonds to build four new TRAX lines in Salt Lake and commuter rail in Utah County.

The bonds were a success; the people approved them overwhelmingly.

But the legislative leadership decided to put a dangerous time bomb into the new law. They required counties to divert 25% of the new revenue to corridor preservation and to establish a new process for deciding which projects would receive the funding. The new process is to establish a set of weighted criteria for projects based on common goals for transportation projects. So far no problem.

But the legislature’s Executive Appropriations committee has veto power over the set of criteria. Leaders are expected to try to shift Salt Lake County transit money to their favorite road projects around the state. By shifting the criteria they want to move our transit projects off the top of the list.

A little story from Texas today. We added one more congressman yesterday who has supported Utah’s interests on issues like nuclear testing and public lands conservation. But the way it happened has some partisan redistricting twists.

In 2002 Democrats hoped to replace San Antonio Congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) with candidate Henry Cuellar. We lost by a hair, 51%-47%.

In 2003 Tom DeLay used strong arm tactics (for which he has since been indicted) to persuade the Texas legislature to redraw congressional districts. One goal was to move Henry Cuellar and his hometown of Laredo into another San Antonio based district then represented by progressive Democratic Congressman Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX).

In 2004 Henry Cuellar challenged Representative Rodriguez in a primary and lost an even closer race. But then new boxes of previously unknown votes were ‘discovered’ in Laredo that pushed Cuellar into the lead by 203 votes. Rodriguez’s campaign lawyers missed the deadlines or misfiled the paperwork to challenge the suspicious votes.

Congressman Cuellar joined Congress in 2005, but Rodriguez filed to run again in the primary in 2006. With no Republican filing in the race, it was effectively the first general election of 2006. Cuellar won the primary by 13%, winning a strong victory in Laredo while Rodriguez won in San Antonio.

But in Summer of 2006 federal courts rules that the 2003 redistricting violated the Voting Rights Act by dividing Latino voters in an effort to deprive them of their voice in Henry Bonilla’s district. Now Henry Cuellar is in his own Laredo district and Rodriguez and Bonilla are together in a San Antonio based district. After the court decision there wasn’t time for a regular primary so the primary was held on November 7th and the general election was December 12th.

That meant Rodriguez was in both the first and last general election for Congress in 2006 and while he lost the first he won the second.

With the Rodriguez victory 55%-45% over Bonilla we have both Democrats Cuellar and Rodriguez in Congress, so the story has a happy ending.