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Hello friends: This is our first email blast, so there’s lots of news. Read on and please share widely!

The story so far

Our grassroots group decided to file a ballot measure after it became clear to us that clean air was not a top priority of the state legislature (see “Legislature falls far short of governor’s goal of investing $100M to improve air quality”) and that climate action was not a priority at all. (A lot of work went into HB304 in 2019 and HB403 in 2018, but neither of those bills got much traction, and other paths forward looked similarly daunting.) We filed our application and draft ballot language on April 8, the ballot language being a modified version of HB304. (See the Our Policy page for details.) Following the ballot measure process, we then waited about 30 days for a Fiscal Impact Statement, which was released on May 6, and then held and recorded 7 public hearings around the state on May 7-8.  (Follow the links for the recordings, which will also be posted online by the Lt Governor’s office.)

Next steps

Per the ballot measure process, we have up to 14 days to make changes to the measure. (We arelikely to make some tweak, but we’d like to make them sooner rather than later in order to have as much time as possible for signature-gathering, so read on if you’d like to chime in!) Assuming that changes are made, we will have to again wait for up to 30 days for an updated Fiscal Impact Statement, at which point the measure will be finalized and we can begin collecting signatures, roughly mid-June. We then have until February 15 of next year to gather the necessary signatures to qualify for the 2020 ballot. (The exact signature totals for 2020 will be available from the Lt Governor in mid-May, but we will need approximately 115,000 signatures statewide, plus that same percentage–8% of active voters–in 26 of the 29 state senate districts.) Then once we’re on the ballot we need to win!

How you can help

  1. Comment on our blog or via email about the changes we are considering (or suggest changes that we aren’t currently considering!). See the next paragraph for details.
  2. Share this email with all your friends and encourage them to get involved by signing up on our website, CleanTheDarnAir.org. (If you’re ever in a rush or typing with your thumbs, DarnAir.org goes to the same website.)
  3. Make a donation to support the campaign, volunteer to organize a signature-gathering chapter in your area, provide feedback on the design and content of our website, or otherwise help us move forward! You can send comments or suggestions via the website or just reply to this email (info@CleanTheDarnAir.org).

Potential changes to the ballot measure

ideally we would like to finalize everything by mid-afternoon tomorrow, Friday May 10, so please send feedback ASAP. Here are possible changes we’re considering:

  1. The Fiscal Impact Statement shows a shortfall in the first fiscal year (FY 2022, which is the one-year period ending June 30, 2022) of about $115m. That wasn’t our intent, and the Tax Commission (which we were pleased and surprised to learn is happy to talk to folks working on ballot measures!) suggested language to correct that shortfall by delaying for one year the effective date of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Retirement Tax Credit.
  2. The Fiscal Impact Statement also shows a $221m increase in tax revenues once the bill is fully implemented in FY2024; that $221m is the difference between the $628m in expected carbon tax revenue and the $407m in expected tax reductions due to the elimination of the state sales tax on grocery store food etc. Under the current bill language, that $221m goes to pay for $75m in air quality and $25m in rural economic development, and then the remainder goes into a Tax Cut Restricted Account for additional tax cuts as determined by the legislature. But nobody seems to like that approach, and we got a lot of feedback that $25m wasn’t enough for rural economic development, so we’re looking at increasing the rural economic development funding from $25m a year to $50m a year.
  3. We’ve received a lot of feedback (from both supporters and opponents!) that $75m a year for air quality funding isn’t enough for a campaign calling itself Clean The Darn Air, so we’re looking at increasing the air quality funding from $75m a year to $100m a year, or perhaps even more.(The way the bill is structured, the first priority for carbon tax revenue is paying for the tax cuts in the bill; the second priority is air quality and rural economic development, and any remaining money goes into the Tax Cut Restricted Account. So we can increase air quality and rural economic development funding without impacting anything else except the Tax Cut Restricted Account. To give a very hypothetical specific example, we could specify $500m a year for air quality and rural economic development and nothing “bad” would happen: there wouldn’t be enough carbon tax revenue to fund that whole $500m after paying for the tax cuts, so only a portion of that funding would actually be directed to air quality and rural economic development.)
  4. If we do increase funding for air quality and rural economic development, it will be important to specify the exact priority funding for revenue. The current bill language prioritizes $60m for the DEQ Clean Air Fund, then $15m for the CARROT air pollution clean-up program, then $25m for rural economic development. It might make sense to change this to prioritize this to, say, $25m for CARROT, then $50m for rural economic development, then $75m (or more) for the Clean Air Fund.
  5. One member of the Advisory Board we’re building (about which more later) suggested providing / reinstating subsidies for solar power and for electric cars.
  6. Technical: There’s language requiring a $20m balance in the Carbon Tax Fund, and it might make sense to reduce or eliminate that requirement. There are some other technical changes and changes suggested by state Tax Commission that we will follow as well.

Please chime in on the blogor via email if you have feedback on any of these or other suggestions of your own! Also please keep in mind that we’re a grassroots group with a limited ability to write legal code, so suggestions that involve major rewrites or additions are likely to be difficult unless you can help us with the legal language.

In the news

We were the top story last night on the Salt Lake Tribune website, but even more important are the front-page headlines that are motivating our campaign, stories like “Salt Lake, Orem, and Provo among worst in the nation for air pollution”and “Childhood cancer survivors kept showing up in Utah emergency rooms unable to breathe. Researchers have now figured out what’s going on.”The bottom line is that we need to Clean The Darn Air!!

PS. One final thought

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who organized or participated in hearings around the state and to everyone who provides feedback or donates or otherwise gets involved! It’s not always pretty or easy to get involved at very start of a grassroots campaign, but as one supporter in Springdale put it: “This sort of thing is the only way forward to change the inertia of the governing bodies. Count me in on helping and creating change!”

Cheers,
Yoram and fellow Clean The Darn Air volunteers