Task Force has scheduled eight Town Halls throughout Utah
The job before it is monumental. The input of small business never of more paramount importance.
The first meeting of the Tax Restructuring and Equalization Task Force was held May 30. Now, eight Town Halls have been partially scheduled to get the public’s engagement on nothing less than the complete overhaul of the way state and local governments collect taxes and spend revenues.
The tentative dates and places of the Town Halls are:
- June 25 in Brigham City
- June 27 in Salt Lake County
- June 28 in Richfield
- June 29 in St. George
- July 8 in Davis/Weber County
- July 9 in Roosevelt
- July 20 in Moab
- July 30 in Utah County
The start times are planned for 6 p.m. Exact locations will be forthcoming. The task force consists of 10 state legislators, four experts, and five staff members. Their names can be read here. Its guiding principles can be read here, and its planned process here.
Why the Need for the Task Force?
Quite simply, the state’s population growth has placed a worsening strain on existing state revenues. Utah grew by 400,000 people between 2010 and 2018. Couple that with the changing nature of consumer spending. Services, which are not subjected to the state sales tax, have supplanted spending on goods, which are taxed, by better than two to one.
A third problem is the inflexibility of what the task force calls “silos” – money that by law must be dedicated to a specific expenditure and cannot be spent on anything else. According to the task force:
- Property Tax is Local Revenue and spent on Public Education
- Income Tax per our Constitution must be spent on Public and Higher Education
- Sales Tax is siloed into the General Fund and must support funding for Medicaid, General Government, Public Safety, Social Services, additional funding for higher education and additional funding for transportation
- Gas Tax is siloed into the Transportation Fund and must be spent on Transportation.
“If you visualize this, you can see that the General Fund is not able to sustain funding for all of the demand,” said Candace Daly, NFIB Utah stated director. The General Fund pays for:
- Air Quality
- Medicaid
- Transportation*
- Education*
- Public Safety
- Recreation
- Support for Children, Disabled, and Elderly
- Homelessness and Affordable Housing
*Transportation and education receive a portion of the General Fund in addition to the revenues they get from their “silos.”
First, Do No Harm
Utah consistently ranks high as a place to do business in surveys taken by U.S. News and World Report, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Forbes, Bloomberg, and others, “but that said, the state has some problems we need to fix in order to keep the quality of life stable,” said Daly. “Utah has a Triple-A bond rating it has never lost,” added Daly, “so the first job of the task force is to do no harm.”
Daly added that it was important for NFIB members to remember that the task force will not start its work attempting to fix House Bill 441, this year’s legislative attempt to reform the tax code. The task force is starting from scratch—everything is on the table.
“Never before in our state’s history will small-business owners have to be more vigilant and more involved than right now,” said Daly. “Reforming and restructuring our state’s tax code is the largest public policy endeavor in our lifetime.”
Keep up with the latest task force news and member calls to action at this webpage, www.nfib.com/utah, and on Twitter @NFIB_UT.
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