Well-managed state

Kudos to Utah’s lawmakers, governor and support staff. A new report by Brookings Mountain West, a cooperative effort by the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada Las Vegas, has glowing praise for the way the state has navigated the recession. It’s titled, “Structurally unbalanced: Cyclical and structural deficits in California and the Mountain West. (Find the report here under “What’s new.”)

The report focuses on California, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado, and how each of them has created serious structural budget imbalances by using “one-time budget tricks” to balance their books during the lean years.
Utah, on the other hand, gets special notice in a sidebar article titled, “Stability in Utah: Maintaining balance with good information and sound processes.”
Lawmakers here may waste a lot of time on “message bills” and other useless things, but they know how to budget, even if you might not agree with their priorities. The report was particularly impressed with how open and public Utah’s budgeting process is, and how all branches of state government rely on the same data, conduct annual reviews and align their budgetary priorities.
Brookings is not a conservative organization. The report spends a lot of ink criticizing tax cuts and budget cuts in other states that have put education, public safety and public health in jeopardy.
But of Utah it says, “In sum, routine, evidence-and-process-driven review has enabled one Mountain West state to catch an incipient structural deficit early and act intentionally to rectify it before it becomes entrenched.”