Utah State Legislature

Foreword

This online resource - the Compendium of Budget Information (COBI) - detail's Utah's budget and related financial transactions. It contains financial history, references to statutory authority, performance information, and staff budget analysis. It has been prepared as a companion to appropriations bills considered in the 2014 General Session of the Utah State Legislature. Readers can navigate COBI in a number of ways, as explained in this video as well as this COBI Quick Start Guide.

Utah's Budget

In the 2014 General Session Utah Legislators reviewed and appoved more than $15 billion in appropriations. Most of those appropriations constitute what is commonly referred to as "the budget". The remainder permit state accountants to move money among funds and activities or they represent "off-budget" financial transactions like proprietary funds or trust funds.

Utah's budget from all sources totalled $13.5 billion at the end of the 2014 General Session. Within that amount is about $5.8 billion (43%) in discretionary General and Education fund appropriations. As shown in Figure 1, the remainder of the budget comes from federal funds (27%), restricted revenue (10%), dedicated credits (9%), local property tax for education (5%), sales tax directed to the Transportation Investment Fund (4%), and the Transportation Fund (3%).

Figure 2 shows the same $13.5 billion budget by area of expenditure. Education - higher and public combined - gets the biggest piece of the pie at 42%. Because of the amount of federal assistance programs administered by the state, social services comes in second at 34% followed by transportation (7%), general government (7%) and law enforcement (5%). Approximately 3% of the state budget currently goes to pay interest and principal on debt.

Legislators act on the budget during legislative sessions. However, agencies have some leeway in budgeting and thus budgets can change between sessions. Agency re-estimates and prior-year closing, plus supplemental legislative appropriations, changed the FY 2014 budget from what legislators passed in the 2013 General Session. Those changes show in the "2014 Change" column of the tables below.

The budget amounts change again leading up to the FY 2015 Base Budget. By rule, all prior-year one-time General and Education fund appropriations are stripped-out of the base. Federal funds and dedicated credits can increase to as much as 125% of what was authorized in FY 2014. Transfers and nonlapsing balances included in base budget bills are as estimated by agencies. Legislators then adjusted these base budgets through various appropriations acts, resulting in the authorizations shown in the "FY 2015 Approp" column.

These numbers, and the total budget table below, include operating and capital budgets (Table 1) plus any appropriation to a fund or account from which state agencies can spend without further appropriation (Table 2) . Details are included in the budget tables herein.

Appropriations acts include more than just the operating, capital, and expendable fund appropriations. They also authorize state agencies and the state Division of Finance to operate Internal Service and Enterprise funds (Table 3), move money among funds (Table 4), and sweep fund and account balances into the General and Education funds (Table 5). The Legislature further includes in appropriations acts certain trust funds that it has reviewed (Table 6).

Utah is unique in that all legislators serve on the Joint Appropriations Committee. That committee is divided into eight issue-oriented appropriations subcommittees. The subcommittees are:

• Business, Economic Development, and Labor;
• Executive Offices and Criminal Justice;
• Higher Education;
• Infrastructure and General Government;
• Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environmental Quality;
• Public Education;
• Retirement and Independent Entities;
• Social Services

COBI is organized around these subcommittees - plus the Executive Appropriations Committee (EAC). To drill-down into agency, line-item, and program budgets covered by a particular subcommittee or by EAC, you may click on the committee names in the tables below, go to our Statewide Table of Contents, or use the navigation links at the top and bottom of each page.

Utah State Budget Summary

For more detail about a particular source of finance or organizational unit, click a linked entry in the left column of the tables below.

Table 1: Operating and Capital Budget Including Transfers to Expendable Funds and Accounts

Table 2 - Operating and Capital Budgets

Table 3 - Expendable Funds and Accounts

Table 4 - Business-like Activities

Table 5 - Restricted Fund and Account Transfers

Table 6 - Transfers to Unrestricted Funds

Table 7 - Fiduciary Funds

Table 8 - Capital Project Funds

Table 9 - Reconciled Transfers Included in Operating and Capital Budgets

Table 10 - Operating and Capital Budget Including Expendable Funds and Eliminating Reconciled Internal Transfers