Because it is important that government is accountable and transparent with how we spend tax-payer dollars, this email is full of information on where to find Utah’s budget information and an initial summary of how the America Rescue Plan Act funds will be distributed in Utah.
BUDGET INFO
You can find everything you you ever wanted to know, or didn’t want to know, about Utah’s budget at budget.utah.gov. You can also get to this link by going to le.utah.gov and clicking on Budget. Legislative staff has done their best to make it user friendly, but it can still be a bit tricky to navigate and understand, so here are some of the links on this page and brief explanations of what you can find. Many thanks are owed to Ben Leishman, Thomas Young, Ivan Djambov, Lacey Moore, Kimberly Madsen, and all the Legislative Financial Analysts’ staff for their hard work on putting this together.
Budget Quick Facts – A pocket-sized guide to the budget. 
Budget in Bullets – Lists some highlights of the 2021 state budget overall as well as the details for each appropriations subcommittee.
DataViz – An interactive graphical representation of the budget. I am not super familiar with this graphic, but you can view the budget by sources, uses, and new money. Click a bubble to see where the funds come from, how the budget has changed over time, and in what bills it changed.
For example, Social Services is the biggest bubble, but if you click on it, you can see that 66% of the funds come from the federal government–mostly to fund Medicaid.
Compendium of Budget Information (COBI) – As the name suggests, literally everything budget of which staff could think. Check out the “issues” tab to find out what happened with budget requests. Click on “Navigate” in the top left hand corner to bring up a list of subcommittees, then either double-click on one to bring up that agencies budget or single click to keep narrowing your search to drill down on a specific agency or line-item budget.
Audits — This is where you can find current or past audits. This page is so helpful! Each audit has a link to Fast Facts, a Summary, a Presentation, and a Full Report, so you can spend as much or as little time as you have researching each audit.
ARPA FUNDS
Also in budget.utah.gov, you can find white papers and summaries put out by our fiscal analysts.
On March 11th, Congress enacted the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021, the third (and likely final) round of stimulus funding related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the total $1.9 trillion in Federal aid, the Office of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst (LFA) estimates that over $8.3 billion will make its way to Utah in the forms of payments to state and local governments, targeted agency grants, enhanced unemployment benefits, and individual stimulus checks.
You can find out more about how these funds will be distributed within Utah here. Page three of this summary gives information about direct effect for citizens, including info on stimulus checks, unemployment insurance enhancement, tax credits, PPP grants, and health insurance subsidies.
This link gives information about money to be distributed to local governments.
The Legislature will be called into a special session in May to create a budget for the ARPA funds. Because these funds are one-time, they should only be used for one-time purposes. For example, they shouldn’t be used for salaries, because when the money is gone after a year or two, we couldn’t continue to pay the salaries. However, they could be used for a one-time bonus for employees.
I hope this information is helpful. It is extremely important that Utah’s budget processes and outcomes are transparent and open to public scrutiny, as we are spending your hard earned dollars. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Rep. Marsha Judkins