Winner? We like the idea that the Unified Police Department fee will be disappearing for unincorporated residents of Salt Lake County. The fee never was an ideal was to raise funds for police protection, which normally gets funded as part of a government's regular taxing scheme. We just don't like the fact that it's the state Legislature removing it, rather than the government involved. The Legislature passed a bill that would repeal the fee. But it's the Unified Police Department that still has to pay the bills and deal with the effects of the recession. If Washington had done this to the Legislature, the airport runway wouldn't be able to compete with the decibel level of the howling from state lawmakers.
Loser: Something is happening to the brains of cell phone users. We know that's true when those people are drivers behind the wheel, but this is something different. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that something is going on in the brain when a phone's electromagnetic radiation is against the ear, but it recommends more studies to figure out exactly what this is, and whether it's good or bad. Why do we suspect it isn't going to be found to be good?
Winner: On a week when the national unemployment rate dipped below 9 percent, the state Department of Workforce Services released a report that jobs in Utah expanded by 1.5 percent during January. The state's unemployment rate now stands at 7.6 percent. That's a far cry from rates that were below 3 percent just a few years ago, but it's nice to hear good employment news again.
Loser: Among the worst bills proposed at the Legislature this year is SB309, sponsored by Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton. It would bar the public from knowing the salaries of any public employee earning less than $85,000 per year. The bill presumes that politicians and bureaucrats control the government. They don't; the people do. No CEO of a private company would tolerate not having access to all information about where and how money is spent, and neither should the people. Stevenson said the information creates contention. The trouble is, making the information secret lets government leaders get away with a lot of things that ought to create contention.