By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News | Photo courtesy of the Utah State Legislature
As both law enforcement infrastructure and citizen tax burdens sit heavy in the public eye, a new bill aims to give rural towns the flexibility to implement a sales tax increase to help fund infrastructure improvements for municipal police departments.
HB162, introduced by Rep. Christine Watkins (R-Price), would allow municipalities within counties of fourth, fifth and sixth classifications to create a .5% ‘law enforcement infrastructure’ sales tax increase to fund the purchase of equipment for municipal law enforcement.
“It’s like a ZAP (Zoo, arts and parks) tax,” said Watkins of the legislation. “They have to do a truth-in-taxation procedure. They can impose a half a percent addition to their local sales tax. So if Price does it, it’s only Price. If Wellington does it, it’s only Wellington. And all of these cities can do that, and it goes into a very specific restricted fund. And this fund will be used for police cars, the IT (information technology) for the police, the offices for the police, anything but salaries.”
The hope is that the savings from infrastructure investments in law enforcement will free up funds in city budgets for officer pay increases.
Speaking of the motivation behind the bill, Watkins explained,” Mayor (Mike) Kourianos and I went to the legislature and asked that the portion that the cities and the counties pay for our dispatch centers for the people there would be picked up totally by the state. Right now, the state pays about half, give or take some percentages. And so we attempted to do that, but it was really, really expensive. And we wanted to do it for the rural counties. Well, then we had other counties that said, ‘Well, we want to be a part of that.’ And then it just went out of control.”
She continued,” So then, our now new mayor, Terry Willis for Price, came to me last fall. And she had been thinking about this. She had spoken with Mayor Kourianos and said, ‘Hey, what if we just have a little bit of a sales tax that’s dedicated to public safety?’ And so they kind of refined it a little bit, and gave it to me. I gave it to our drafting attorneys and said, ‘This is what we want to do.’ And then they put it together, and I think it’s actually a really good bill.”
The legislation comes at a time when rural municipalities across the state are feeling an increased tax burden as cities struggle to keep up with rising costs. During the last truth-in-taxation cycle, the state’s rural areas were hit hard by increases, including a proposed 225% increase in Wellington, which was later lowered to a 100% hike following public backlash.
The bill also specifies that municipalities seeking to implement the sales tax increase cannot already benefit from a resort community tax, barring cities like Moab from doing so.
“If they already have this special tax because of tourism, and I’m not talking about the TRT, it’s something different, then they don’t qualify because we can’t impose tax after tax on the local people,” the Representative shared. “This is more for the cities, like we said, in Carbon and Emery and maybe Garfield.”
“We’re not imposing it, to me, in a negative way,” added Watkins.