Residents have issued their own warning about what could be permanently lost.

Weber County has some of the most stunning lands and vistas in the state of Utah. Now the Utah Inland Port Authority is poised to turn almost 9,000 acres of largely undeveloped land, near the imperiled Great Salt Lake and the Harold Crane and Ogden Bay waterfowl management areas, into industrial concrete and asphalt projects.

More than 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece, the storyteller Aesop issued a warning that will be ignored at our peril. He told of a farmer who owned a wonderful goose that each day laid a golden egg. The farmer grew rich, but he just had to have more. One day, his greed and impatience got the best of him because he wasn’t getting rich fast enough. He killed the goose to dig out all the eggs inside her. Sadly, there were none, as she could only lay one a day. And now his lovely goose was dead.

Residents of western Weber County have beautiful golden eggs — wetlands, open spaces, wildlife habitat, clear skies, peace and quiet — riches by anyone’s definition. But UIPA and the Weber County Commission, which has voted to support UIPA’s plans, want their goose for different kinds of riches.

The residents are pushing back. They have issued their own warning about what could be permanently lost, requesting that the final decision be put on hold until the repercussions are fully studied, and more citizens are made aware of them.

The statement reads, “This project area cedes local control and budget authority to a state-appointed board. Various groups across the political spectrum are calling on Weber County to study the full impact, including the budget burden to local taxpayers, attracting heavy truck traffic to an area that does not have it now, bright lighting, destruction of wetlands, inestimable noise and attracting sources of air pollution.”

John Valentine, head of the Utah Tax Commission, spoke about a different kind of golden egg at a recent meeting of the Utah Taxpayer Association. This golden egg is our tax base that pays for schools, parks, road repairs, emergency services, fire and police protection.

According to Fox13 News, Valentine warned, “Some of the projects that we’ve passed in the state are eroding the tax base by sales tax diversions and tax increment financing.” He included the inland port as one example.

UIPA’s Weber County inland port project will keep 75% of all property and sales taxes it generates to be used at the board’s discretion and give back only 25% of those revenues to local governments.

In other words, UIPA and developers will build the port, but government entities will have only 25% to provide critical services. UIPA will build infrastructure, but they will not maintain it.

Rusty Cannon, president of the taxpayers’ association, issued his own warning about projects that have been adding up over decades.

“It’s just death by a thousand cuts. It’s been coming and it’s starting to hollow out our tax base.” he said.

This could lead to increased taxes for the part of the county that is not in the project area.

At a meeting in February, Weber County commissioners questioned whether 25% will be enough to provide all the services needed. Scott Wolford, Vice President of the Business Development Team for the Utah Inland Port Authority, stated, “We don’t have to get it right today. We’re just taking our best guess. We will adjust through the 25 years.”

He assured the commissioners that they can vote later to take a certain parcel out of the inland port project area if the tax structure doesn’t work. All they have to do, he said, is to ask the UIPA board, “Please remove this from the project area, and our board will take it out.”

Wolford admitted, however, there is no statutory protection for Weber County and that the five-member, appointed board has final authority. He made an unwritten promise, based on nothing but his word, that UIPA’s decisions can be easily reversed.

He also applied pressure for a quick decision by reporting that we have “a lot of communities stacked up for project areas,” so Weber County could lose its place in line.

If UIPA approves the project at its meeting on Monday, it looks like they and the taxpayer-subsidized developers will keep the miraculous goose. Once she’s dead, her bones will be tossed back to the people.

You can’t resurrect a dead goose, and you can’t restore acres and acres of land taken away from future generations and destroyed forever.

Aesop always gave us the moral of his stories for those of us who miss the point. “Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have.”

Ann Florence taught English and journalism and now teaches therapeutic poetry at the Youth Resource Center for unsheltered young people. She finds solitude, healing and inspiration in nature.

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State Auditor John Dougall thinks the best place for a congressman to serve Utah is in the weeds.

After two decades of working to lighten Utah’s tax load and shed light on government waste, Dougall says he wants to bring his penchant for problem-solving to the nation’s Capitol representing the state’s 3rd Congressional District.

But selling constituents on the importance of welfare reform and budget reduction is a problem to solve all on its own.

As a former state lawmaker and tech entrepreneur, with graduate degrees in electrical engineering and business from Brigham Young University, Dougall said he believes the Republican Party of late has been less interested in outcomes than political point-scoring.

“The Republican Party used to be the party of big ideas,” Dougall said. “We have nothing but infighting, squabbling, performative politics.”

Dougall was ready for retirement from public service following his 10 years in the Utah House of Representatives and 11 years overseeing the state auditor’s office, he said. But he said the absence of “any real budget hawks back in D.C.” drew Dougall to Rep. John Curtis’ soon-to-be-open seat.

“I’ve got a unique skill set when it comes to these issues,” Dougall said. “And I think the financial matters, the debt, the out of control spending, the dysfunction in Washington, D.C., this is one of the top national crises.”

Creative solutions to the nation’s biggest money problems

For those who don’t feel the same sense of urgency about the country’s balance sheets, Dougall has a thought experiment.

Imagine a Utah household making $100,000 a year and spending $130,000 with the help of a credit card. The monthly minimum credit card payment would exceed most Utahns’ biggest budget item, their mortgage, Dougall said, making it harder to pay for essential needs and leaving the family at the mercy of steep interest rates.

In fiscal year 2024, Dougall pointed out, the United States is expected to pay more on interest payments to service the national debt than on national defense — a sober milestone that comes on the heels of federal debt surpassing $34.5 trillion for the first time, increasing by a rate of roughly $1 trillion every 100 days.

Dougall has incorporated an interactive “Balance the Federal Budget” tool into his campaign website to help voters visualize the problem. The feature is similar to the property value and public education tracking tools that he developed as auditor to help Utahns follow their tax dollars and access government information.

The country’s biggest problem has “no single silver bullet” solution, Dougall said, but “we can’t just keep doing the same thing because we’re going to get the same results. We’ve got to try and be more innovative, we’ve got to try and push big ideas to try and solve these very, very difficult problems.”

For Social Security — the retirement benefit program that drives more than one-fifth of federal spending — Dougall proposes a shift to state sponsored retirement trust funds modeled after 529 college savings plans.

This would allow workers to opt out of Social Security benefits, which are projected to be cut by 20% in a decade. Workers would then be able to invest that portion of their payroll tax into a state sponsored investment fund “to get them a better, more secure retirement” while giving Democrats the government oversight they demand to protect all workers, Dougall said.

Such a massive overhaul of Social Security would have to be phased in, with different age cohorts being allowed to allocate more or less of their payroll tax, Dougall said.

When it comes to government-provided health care for the elderly, however, Dougall said an overhaul doesn’t go far enough.

“I don’t want the federal government running Medicare better,” Dougall said. “I want to get the federal government out of health care.”

Enabling competition with government provided health care, facilitating direct care models and reimbursing procedures the same regardless of location would result in hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, Dougall said.

“It won’t balance the budget, but it’s a big step in the right direction,” Dougall said. “And it can put patients more in control of their health care so they can get better quality care.”

Subsidized health care programs for low income Americans, like Medicaid, also need to be stripped of federal involvement, Dougall said, with funds and oversight being handed over to the states, instead of the “split-funded” system currently in place that creates a “mismatch of accountability” that incentivizes states to grow Medicaid rolls, Dougall said.

Block-granting Medicaid funding to the states and expanding work requirements for “able-bodied individuals” would result in another $100 billion in annual savings, Dougall said — far short of the $1.7 trillion deficit in 2023, but one of the many trade offs needed to make federal spending look more like a responsible home budget.

The government watchdog candidate

Dougall has more time in government than any of his four opponents in the Republican Party primary election. The crowded field of five also includes Roosevelt Mayor JR Bird, Sky Zone CEO Case Lawrence, commercial litigator Stewart Peay and state Sen. Mike Kennedy.

Dougall took over the state auditor’s office in 2013 after ousting a longtime incumbent in a primary election. As auditor, Dougall held officials accountable and reviewed the state’s COVID-19 expenditures, database security and implemented programs to make government financial information available for “essentially every state and local entity in Utah.”

Dougall also emphasized transparency during his 10-year tenure as a state lawmaker which immediately preceded his time as a state auditor. He contributed to the public meeting notice website and pushed to repeal the state’s vehicle inspection program, which required added bureaucracy with little benefits to show for it, he said.

In 2005, Dougall was a member of the Tax Reform Task Force that led to the passage of Utah’s biggest restructuring of the tax-code in decades, which included a 5% single-rate income tax.

These policy wins were the result of focusing on how to get a solution across the finish line without worrying about “who gets the credit” or “the next election cycle,” Dougall said — an attitude he plans to bring to the contentious halls of Congress.

“I will work with anybody who’s willing to fight out-of-control spending, to try and rein in the federal government, to try and balance the budget,” Dougall said. “I’ll work with anybody, I don’t care who they are, because that’s what it’s going to take.”

Dougall’s other priorities include securing the southern border and ensuring American energy dominance. He also believes the U.S. should continue to provide “targeted assistance” to Ukraine to stop Russia’s advance and prevent a bigger war in Europe.

Dougall — John ‘Frugal’ Dougall on the ballot — will face his four primary opponents on June 25. The Republican who wins the primary will face off against Democratic candidate Glenn Wright on Nov. 5.

Correction: An earlier version said Dougall has spent 10 years as state auditor and that he was co-chair of the Tax Reform Task Force. He has been state auditor for 11 years and was a member of the task force, but not co-chair.

SALT LAKE CITY — While some aspects of inflation are cooling down, the cost of renting is going up.

According to the latest Consumer Price Index, rent was 5.4% more expensive in April than last year.

Dejan Eskic, who studies the housing market at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, said that’s a little surprising.

“We’ve had so much apartment inventory across every major metropolitan area in the country,” Eskic said.

That includes Utah. Eskic said just this year, about 8,000 new apartments are hitting the market.

Because of that “record new supply,” he said rental prices along the Wasatch Front have actually decreased slightly.

“We’ve seen rents drop just a little bit under 2%,” Eskic said, adding that he believes rents will stay flat or drop slightly over the next 12 to 18 months.

But that won’t continue forever.

“As we move further out, there’s less and less new construction happening,” Eskic said, “and so we do expect in about two years rents to start increasing again like we’ve experienced previously.”

Jed Coon, who lives with his wife and daughter in Tooele, is tired of paying rent.

“It’d be very nice to just have it go down,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”

Over the years, as a renter, Coon said he’s noticed one trend – rent keeps going up.

“We started off $1,000, $1,200 – cheap rundown places – and now it’s up to $1,700, $1,800,” he said.

Coon said he and his family plan to move back in with parents to try to get a leg up in this difficult market. Rent is a big part of their budget, and it’s tough to pay for everything.

“We’re barely getting by,” Coon said. “It’s rent and then the utilities, and that’s it, so not so much for everything else.”