By Dan Bammes
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kuer/local-kuer-946368.mp3
Salt Lake City, UT – Just as the Utah legislature prepares to open its general session, a key player in the state's complicated budget process has switched sides. Republican Representative Ron Bigelow had just been elected to his 9th term in District 32 in West Valley when Governor Gary Herbert asked him to leave the legislature and become the new director of his Office of Planning and Budget. It's almost as if one team in the Super Bowl had drafted the other team's quarterback just before kickoff.
Ron Bigelow is thoughtful and soft-spoken, someone colleagues say can see the big picture and still manage myriad details. For the past four sessions, he was the House chair of the Executive Appropriations Committee, made up of the leadership from both parties. It's a powerful job - Executive Appropriations provides the building blocks of the budget to other committees and wraps up the details as the session ends. But he says the key to the job was listening to colleagues and to constituents.
"I was willing to and did talk to many of the advocates and even some of those where programs were eliminated," he says. "I made a point to go out, whether it was in the hall or in my office to talk with em and listen to the real ramifications of what we were doing."
Sometimes, he says, those decisions were heartbreaking, such as the decision to cut DORA, the Drug Offender Rehabilitation Act. He talks about meeting with a group of women who asked him to keep it going.
Bigelow says, "They had lost their children. They had been in prison. I mean, about everything bad that could happen, happened to them. They got into this program. It turned their lives around. They were now back with their families. They were back as productive members of society. It's hard to argue with a success like that that made a tremendous difference for them and now the impact they're having on society. And to talk with em and say, You're right. It's a great program. But it's fairly expensive and it's one that we're going to cut.' And we did."
Even those who disagreed with him politically say Bigelow had an even-handed approach. David Litvack, the Democrats' leader in the House, says he handled budget decisions in a practical way rather than being rigidly ideological.
"That can be a very scary and dangerous thing," says Litvack,"whether we're looking at it from the left or the right. It's got to be much more holistic in approach, and moderate in approach, and Representative Bigelow, that's the way he budgeted."
But now that he's joined the executive branch, Bigelow is under no illusions that he'll get everything the governor is asking for.
"Will my colleagues probably respect me enough at least to listen to me, at least in the discussion? The answer is yes. Does that mean they will suddenly change their minds on an issue and do it just because Ron Bigelow said it? No, I don't think that's true."
Bigelow is a certified public accountant who worked for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for 28 years, supervising the financial side of its missionary department. He's retiring now from his church position to work full-time in state government.
Now that he's in a job where the arcane minutiae of the state budget is his full-time responsibility, Ron Bigelow has a smile on his face. He says he used to joke with his colleagues about what they were really there for.
"You can run your bills cause we can't fill up all your time with the budget," he says. "So do that just to fill up your time, keep you occupied, and then we get to the fun part, which is the budget, the numbers. But personally, I actually do feel that way. I, obviously, am in a field that I love, working with accounting, with budgeting, with numbers. And so, for me, this job is very enjoyable."
Former House Speaker Mel Brown will take over as the House chair of the legislature's executive appropriations committee and Fred Cox has been appointed to fill the District 32 legislative seat from West Valley.