Utah News

The Bill of Rights celebration is an annual fundraiser for the ACLU Utah.  Anna Brower is the Development Director for the ACLU of Utah. She spoke with UPR's Ashley Tolman about the organization's Bill of Rights Celebration taking place this week in Salt Lake City.

Brower explains the choice of this year's theme, "Power of the People":

This year, chronic homelessness is down 9%.

Lieutenant Governor Greg Bell says this can be directly attributed to low cost housing options that have been made available over the last few years as part of the state’s “Housing First” initiative:

“Those are not all the same kind of facilities but the real success has been the intermingling, not just of housing and lodging, but creating a spectrum of housing for transitional up to permanent and integrating that with social and human and health services.”

Thousands of the world’s next generation of leaders are spending a few days in Utah. DECA, an organization targeted toward students interested in marketing, finance and management is holding its International Career Development Conference at the Salt Palace.

It’s 2:00 on Monday and 14-year-old Sherry Ann Morgenstern is preparing for the Principles of Finance competition.

Administrators at Hurricane High School in Washington County initiated the familiar call to evacuate the school and gather outside in the predetermined places for an accounting, but this time it was not a drill.

Early Monday morning, a teacher noticed smoke coming from the the school's wood shop room. He alerted authorities and the school was evacuated. The fire occurred in the shop's dust ventilation system, and although some smoke and water damage resulted, the small shop is in a building separate from the rest of the school, so the damage and potential threat was very limited.

Utah Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee joined a minority of senators last week in voting against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The Alliance for a Better Utah believes that a vote against reauthorizing the Act represents a callous insult not just to the women of Utah but to the entire population of Utah and the United States.

Alliance for a Better Utah Executive Director, Maryann Martindale told UPR's Kerry Bringhurst that:

Organizations in Utah who serve residents receiving Medicaid and State Child Health Insurance are calling for Utah lawmakers to hold a special session to allocate money that would be used to help those whose personal information was stolen when a state computer system was hacked.

Judi Hilman is with the Utah Health Policy Project. She says the state is not doing enough to help the more than 800,000 victims:

Vince Rampton officially filed paperwork to run for office alongside Democratic gubernatorial candidate Peter Cooke. Rampton, who is the son of former Utah Governor Calvin Rampton, says as Lieutenant Governor he would focus on transparency in campaign financing, more precise requirements for lobbyists and more facilitative rules governing initiatives and referendums

He also says allowing electronic signatures to be gathered for petitions is also very important to the process: 

Hoping to muster up a stronger voice to direct towards Washington, Governor Gary Herbert met with the Governors of Wyoming and Idaho on Friday in the first ever “Rocky Mountain Roundtable.”

“This is really a beginning, the desire to communicate better as governors with each other and learn from each other, our success and our failures, and see if we can become better governors. And unite our voices where we have common concern.”

Last week 59-year-old Victoria Grover from Maine parked her rented car on Hell's Backbone Road in remote Southern Utah and set out for a day hike to Sand Creek and back. But when sunset came she was nowhere near her car.

On Wednesday she broke her leg while moving through the rugged terrain and spent the next 4 days and nights stranded in the wilderness.