Dan Bammes

Utah law as well as federal law requires a background check to buy any kind of firearm, and the state can deny a purchase based on a person's history of mental illness. But that happens only rarely. Dwayne Baird with the Utah Department of Public Safety says someone who's been found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity would be ineligible, or others whose history of violence has been certified by a district court.

Rocky Mountain Power generates most of the electricity to serve its customers in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho by burning coal. But it's planning to shut down the Carbon power plant, a coal-fired generating station just outside Helper, in part because of the cost of complying with new environmental regulations.

The Utah legislature will be looking at changes to the state's building code to make homes and businesses much more energy efficient.  Garbett Homes’ Terra Sol development in South Salt Lake meets and even exceeds the new 2012 building code standard.  The recommendation from the state’s Uniform Building Code Commission requires making homes much more airtight.  Energy inspector Steven Thon showed reporters how it’s done with foam sealing the top of exterior walls.

At the bottom of the recession in 2009, Utah’s economy was losing jobs at the rate of six percent a year.  A year later, the number of jobs was growing again, but slowly.  Today, Utah is adding jobs at close to three percent annually and the state’s unemployment rate has dropped below six percent for the first time since 2008.

Residential and business construction was the hardest hit sector by far, and the Utah Foundation’s Morgan Lyon Cotti says it’s been among the slowest to recover.

Utah spends less per student in its public schools than any other state.  Not just a little less – 15% less than Idaho, the next on the list.  Utah’s been at the bottom since 1988.

There are several reasons for that last-place ranking, but the most important is the high ratio of children to adults in Utah – 20-percent more kids as a proportion of the population than most other states.

Utahns cringe when they look at the prices on the gas pumps these days, though prices here haven’t reached the levels seen in California this fall.  Most of the gasoline that’s refined and sold in Utah comes from oil produced in the Mountain West.  But Utah Foundation researcher Shawn Teigen says the price still responds to national and international markets.

The Affordable Care Act promises to extend the reach of health care coverage to many people who don’t have it now.  Critics say it will do that at a huge cost in both money and individual liberty.  But the mandate in the law for nearly everyone to buy health insurance has been upheld by the U-S Supreme Court and that requirement will take effect in 2014.  The question facing Utah and the rest of country is how to implement the provisions that are maintained by the states.

When Utah’s economy was roaring along in the middle of the decade, then-Governor Jon Huntsman and legislative leaders were looking for ways to reduce the burden of taxes on Utah’s economy.  It seemed as though there was plenty of new money to raise pay for teachers, build new roads and expand the reach of social services.

The top rate for state income taxes had been 7.5%. That was reduced to a flat rate of 5%.  The state sales tax on food was also reduced, and the state was still showing big surpluses in revenue – until the recession hit and the bottom fell out.

The president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a change in the minimum age for missionary service Saturday morning in the opening session of the church’s General Conference.  President Thomas S. Monson says young men will now be eligible to serve at age 18, provided they’ve graduated from high school.  The previous minimum age for missionaries from the United States was 19, but Monson says the church has had good experience with younger men from 48 other countries.

Higher education dropped out of the Utah Foundation’s survey of voter concerns over the past couple of election cycles, but it turned up again in its 2012 poll.  It’s risen to the 6th position in the ranking of top ten issues identified by the Utah Priorities Project.

Concern about the environment moved up a notch this year in the Utah Foundation’s survey of issues important to voters.  And while there are many aspects of that issue to look at, voters insist air pollution is at the top of their environmental agenda

The increasing polarization of the political process in Utah and across the nation is the next issue identified by the Utah Foundation as part of its Utah Priorities Project.  In their open-ended survey, voters ranked partisan politics the 8th most important concern.

A former president who also served for many years in Congress once said, “Truth is the glue that holds government together.  Compromise is the oil that makes government go.”  Over the past several years, it has seemed at times that government was pretty low on that oil -- about ready to seize up.

In the second part of KUER’s series The Utah Priorities Project, Utah Foundation researchers take a look at poverty in Utah.  It’s an issue that is new to the list of top ten issues identified by voters in a statewide survey, coming in at #9. 

The recession is partly to blame for the number of people in Utah living in poverty. That total is significantly lower than the nation as a whole, but people living below the federal standard for poverty has continued to grow even as the state’s employment numbers have recovered over the past two years.

The non-partisan Utah Foundation surveys voters every election cycle to find out what issues concern them most.  It's called the Utah Priorities Project, and KUER is presenting a series of programs examining these issues with the help of Foundation researchers.

Talk to the candidates and they'll have a list of issues that they say their constituents respond to.  But Utah Foundation President Steve Kroes says the Utah Priorities Project lets voters set their own agenda.

Smoke from distant wildfires has pushed air pollution levels well above federal health standards in Utah this week.  Fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5) topped 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air on Tuesday afternoon.  Schools aren't required to keep kids indoors during recess until that level reaches 90.  But Doctor Michell Hofmann, a pediatrician at the University of Utah School of Medicine says school administrators and coaches need to think about how many days kids have been breathing bad air as well as just how bad it might be on a given day.

A petition with more than five thousand signatures demanding an end to Utah's attempt to take control of federal lands was delivered Wednesday to Governor Gary Herbert's office.  The effort was led by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and supported by activists like Dwight Butler of Wasatch Touring.  He says the federal government is taking good care of its land right now.

"The state of Utah, there's a good chance, would develop it, or sell parcels off, or divide it up," he told KUER.  "I think it's the best protection we have right now and we should keep it that way."

The head of the University of Utah's environmental and sustainability studies program says he's optimistic about the future of rivers across America.  In his new book River Republic, Professor Dan McCool argues this is happening because Americans are learning the value of their rivers, not for irrigation or hydropower or transportation, but for their own sake.  He spoke with KUER's Dan Bammes. Information about River Republic on Columbia University Press website.

Utah spends millions of dollars promoting the state as a location for movies and commercials, and offers significant tax breaks to production companies when they come here.  A recent confrontation outside Moab caused some worry about the state's reputation as a prime spot for shooting movies.

Back in July, Jerry Bruckhheimer's production company was in southern Utah, shooting scenes for the upcoming Lone Ranger movie starring Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp.

Utah and several other western states are working on plans to protect the sage grouse, with the goal of keeping the birds off the federal endangered species list.  Those plans have to be acceptable to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and it's just issued a draft report that could give the states some guidance.  Noreen Walsh, the deputy administrator for the Fish and Wildlife Service's Mountain Prairie Region, says it addresses the different circumstances such as energy development, predators and urban growth that threaten the sage grouse population across its 11-state range.

Howie Garber came to Utah to go to medical school and worked as an emergency room physician after he graduated from medical school in 1980.  Through the years, he's taken thousands of photographs of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake County, and this month he's publishing many of them in a new book, Utah's Wasatch Range -- Four Season Refuge.  Though the pictures are stunning, it's more than just a coffee table book.

Jim Judd was a firefighter who worked his way up through his union to become the head of the state's largest labor organization, the Utah AFL-CIO.  He died Friday morning from the injuries he suffered in a motorcycle accident in Missoula, Montana.

He was also vice-chairman of the Utah Democratic Party.  State Senator Karen Mayne says he was someone legislators from both parties could trust.

"He had good skills of figuring things out and networking, and negotiating and making everyone feel part of the movement and part of whatever committee he was on," Mayne told KUER.

Monday, August 13th is the deadline for public comments on the Utah Division of Water Quality's assessments of the crude oil spill in Red Butte Creek.  The spill occurred two years ago when an electrical short-circuit burned a hole in the pipeline carrying crude oil and spilled more than 50,000 gallons into the creek.

The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy is wrapping up a four-month tour through Southeast Asia called Pacific Partnership.  Among the 1200 military and civilians aboard the ship there are eight volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  They include Nate Leishman, the church's manager of humanitarian disaster response, who says the opportunity to participate began several years ago when the Navy called to say the church could add volunteers to the humanitarian supplies it had donated on previous missions.

Salt Lake County will be asking for public input on new general plans for Big Cottonwood, Little Cottonwood and Parley's Canyons at an open house scheduled for Thursday afternoon August 9th at the Millcreek Community Center.  The county plans deal primarily with private property in those canyons.  Rolen Yoshinaga, the head of the county's Planning and Development Services Division says the goal is to keep the plans governing those canyons are kept up-to-date.  He spoke with KUER's Dan Bammes.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert has appointed Dan Shrum, a senior vice-president of EnergySolutions, to the state's new Radiation Control Board.  EnergySolutions runs a mile-square landfill in Tooele County for low-level radioactive waste.  The law authorizing the board requires an industry representative to be on it.  Company spokesperson Mark Walker says Shrum is the right guy.

"He's a very fair and balanced man, has been involved in environmental issues his entire career, not only in Utah but around the country" Walker tells KUER.  "And there's absolutely no conflict of interest."

The director of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Pat Mulroy, is threatening to take the state of Utah to the U.S. Supreme Court over an agreement to allocate groundwater in the Snake Valley on the Utah-Nevada state line.  The statement was made in an e-mail to members of SNWA's board of directors.  The agreement was required by federal law before a pipeline could be built carrying water from the Great Basin to Las Vegas.  

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will allow the city of Parowan to kill the prairie dogs that have been digging tunnels under the runway and causing other damage at its airport.  Utah prairie dogs are protected under the Endangered Species Act, but the agency issued a new rule yesterday that allows killing the animals where they pose a safety risk.  Parowan City Manager Shayne Scott thinks the new rule will help bring business back to the airport.

A geologist from the Natural History Museum of Utah has been studying the charcoal found in lakebed sediments around the world.  Mitchell Power has discovered that the number of wildfires dropped significantly from about 1400 AD until about 1800.  That corresponds with the so-called "Little Ice Age," when tree rings and other evidence shows global temperatures were considerably cooler than they are today.