Appropriations subcommittee panel recommends a 2% instead of 7% budget trim.
By Steve Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — A group of lawmakers said Wednesday that Utah’s criminal justice system should take a smaller hit than the 7.5 percent budget cut that all government agencies are struggling to meet during the looming legislative session.
But even a 2 percent cut -- the more manageable level recommended by the criminal justice appropriations subcommittee -- might leave prisons bursting at the seams, nix helicopters and airplanes used by law enforcement and search and rescue teams, and eliminate state cash for rape kits used to gather evidence after a sexual assault.
“The government exists for public safety,” said Rep. Douglas Aagard, R-Kaysville, who after more than six hours of presentations and discussion Wednesday recommended that his committee tell the Legislature’s main money-managing group to settle for the 2 percent cut from its $380 million budget.
The Department of Public Safety could lose 90 full-time employees -- including 30 Utah Highway Patrol troopers -- in a series of money-saving moves that would also eliminate its own dispatch service and sell off two planes and two helicopters used for a slew of services from prisoner extradition to medical evacuation.
Acting Public Safety Commissioner Col. Lance Davenport said it came down to a choice of keeping the Aero Bureau for $1 million per year or keeping 10 troopers.
Said Davenport: “It’s more important to respond on the highway.”
And while safety officials called rape kits
“absolutely essential” in prosecuting rapes, the department said police agencies would have to buy their own in order to save the state $15,000.
Meanwhile, the Department of Corrections is struggling to deal with a booming prisoner population amid a financial crisis.
The number of prisoners being incarcerated in state facilities has doubled each of the past four to five months, said Corrections Executive Director Tom Patterson, who blamed the economy for much of the inmate growth.
Lawmakers might cut funds from a contracting program in which the prison sends state inmates to county jails to free up prison beds. If funding is cut, counties will either see lower revenue or the prison will be forced to take back as many as 260 of its inmates.
Group that with the potential to lose nearly 500 future beds in cuts to a would-be Gunnison Prison expansion and a parole-violator center, and Patterson said Utah’s two prisons could have 600 more inmates than they can hold by September.
That’s on top further job cuts, which may include 40 drug caseworkers as well as drawbacks to various programs and educational services at the prisons.
“We have to have some of those programs,” Patterson said. “You can’t have inmates with nothing to do.
30 trooper
The number of Utah Highway Patrol trooper the Department of Public Safety could lose.
600 inmates
The increase in inmates Utah’s two prisons could have to house by September.
$15,000
What the depatment will save by making police agencies buy their own rape kits.
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