Special session scheduled his month to deal with budget shortfall

Associated Press

LOGAN – Committees at the state legislature have been meeting virtually, of course, because of the ongoing coronavirus threat. They’ve been prepping for an upcoming special session planned just after mid-June. All of this is focused almost entirely on the budget. Currently, the state is dealing with a current budget issue, what’s happening right now with the recession, the pandemic and more. Then the state always has a constitutional mandate to look a year ahead with the budget.

On KVNU’s For the People program last week, Senator Lyle Hillyard said revenue projections should be done by June 15th by legislative research.

“They’re non-partisan, they work with the Democrats, the Republicans together and I really like that fact that we don’t have a Democratic staff or a Republican staff.  They’ll hire experts from outside, economists and people who understand what the economy is all about.

“The governor has people on his staff and he hires outside experts and those people will negotiate pretty heavily between now and the 15th,” explained Hillyard.

He said at that point they should have a consensus figure and they’ll know if it’s a 2 percent cut or 15, 10, 20 or none.

“I would prefer (we) not do it until after July 15th when we find out how much income tax comes in. You may recall, we normally pay our income tax on the 15th of April and that’s been moved to July 15th.  As I discussed this issue with them, we need to have the budget figures done by the 1st of July because that’s when all the agencies, the school districts, everybody starts their budget.”

Hillyard said the special session will be on June 18th or 19th.  More information can be found at le.utah.gov.

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