Candace Salima Resigns Her Position

We are sad to announce that Candace Salima has resigned her position as Legislative District 60 Chair. It wasn't an easy decision but she feels confident that Barbara Petty will do an excellent job in her place.

Legislative Update from Rep. Brad Daw

Representative Brad Daw has always been wonderful at keeping his constituents updated. Here is his latest report from Wednesday's Interim Session of the Utah House.

This week was interim day at the Capitol. If you would like to get a full rundown from all the committees you can take a look at the Interim Highlights. 

Three items I have been working on made news headlines this week. The first was dealing with speed limits.

Higher Speed Limits

I chaired the Transportation Committee and we had a discussion about the 80 MPH study areas on the way to St. George. The report from UDOT indicated that traffic accidents related to speed had not increased by raising the speed limit and that the average speed of traffic had only gone up 2 MPH. So the net result was not cars going a lot faster but more cars in compliance with the speed limit law. This prompted the committee to move ahead with converting the study areas to full fledged 80 MPH zones. For more details you can read the news report here. 

More Hard Times For UTOPIA 

The revenue and tax committee reviewed the audit of UTOPIA that I called for last year. Prior to the audit, the Senate chair of the committee wrote this editorial blasting UTOPIA's response to the audit. Things for UTOPIA did not improve in the committee meeting itself. Many members of the committee were very critical of UTOPIA and various ways of stopping the flow of taxpayer dollars to finance UTOPIA's ever increasing debt were discussed. You can read a report from the committee here. 

Smoking in the Car 

In Health and Human Services committee we heard the annual bill banning smoking in the car when kids 15 or younger are present. This was presented along with dire predictions of health risks if we continued to ignore this terrible plague. They carefully avoided mentioning that any kid with smoking parents is going to get exposed to far more second hand smoke at home than they ever will in a car. And that, for me was the problem. If we start stepping into private property to ban a legal if disgusting activity because the private property is a car then just how close are we to stepping into people's homes to do the same thing? In the past, I have been joined by other colleagues in voting against this bill that is far more symbolic than substantial, but this year I was the lone no vote. Here is a write up on the bill. Any comments on these or any other topic are always welcome. 

Yours sincerely,
Brad Daw