Will you be traveling through the state of Utah this year? You might want to consider stopping by in some of the more popular cities. It is possible that you may need to find a place to stay, and also activities that you can do while you are there. It’s a state that has many different possibilities, some of which are some of the nicest national treasures that we have. Here are a couple of things that you can do in Utah while you are there. One of these locations is going to direct you to an area of Utah that is a national Park with amazing sites that you will see. The other is a religious center, and wonderful structure that is actually world-famous because of its architectural beauty.
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Facebook’s data center deal with Eagle Mountain includes a $5 million sweetener from the state
(Benjamin Wood | Tribune file photo) A rendering of the planned Facebook data center to be built in Eagle Mountain. The center was announced by Gov. Gary Herbert on Wednesday, May 30, 2018.
Facebook will save up to $5.8 million in sales taxes at its planned Eagle Mountain data center, in addition to the roughly $150 million in property tax incentives offered to the social media giant.
The sales tax exemption was acknowledged, but largely de-emphasized, by government representatives involved in the data center negotiations. And specific estimates based on Facebook’s planned data storage facility were not publicly available.
“We don’t generally quantify the state policy stuff, just because it’s so dynamic,” said Theresa Foxley, president of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah.
The $5.8 million figure is based on analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s Office of SB3002. That bill, approved during a special session of the 2016 Legislature, expanded sales tax exemptions to include data centers with the aim of luring Facebook back to the Beehive State after a failed negotiation with West Jordan City.
Facebook will be the first data center to benefit from the sales tax changes, according to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s Office, as the National Security Agency’s data center in Bluffdale predates SB3002. And because the tax exemption has not yet been utilized, the $5.8 million figure is a general estimate based on similar facilities in other states.
Foxley said Facebook was aware of the sales tax exemption, and it likely factored into the company’s decision to locate in Utah. But she added that it was not a specific element in Facebook’s negotiations with Eagle Mountain and state leaders for the project, which is expected to employee less than 50 workers when completed.
Gov. Gary Herbert announced last week that Facebook was the company behind “Project Steeplechase,” confirming suspicions that the company was looking to house a data storage facility in Utah county.
The deal includes a $100 million commitment by Facebook to fund road and utility upgrades — expected to jump-start development on Utah’s County’s west side — in exchange for 20 years of rebated property taxes from Eagle Mountain City, Utah County, Alpine School District, Unified Fire Authority and the Central Utah Water Conservancy District.
Foxley said the deal includes a number of positive and comparatively smaller elements, such as $13 million that the data center will generate for affordable housing projects during the life of the tax incentives.
City and county leaders are also looking at ways to maximize the electrical capacities generated by Facebook’s utility upgrades, Foxley said, and to mitigate increased water usage — a key concern among data center critics — by recycling wastewater for municipal landscaping.
Mortgage limits hurt Utah Valley
Utah’s representatives in Washington should push the Federal Housing Authority to make adjustments to loan limits that unfairly impact north Utah County and threaten the sputtering market in local real estate.
The FHA recently raised its limits on home loans in some areas — meaning a buyer can get a larger loan at a lower interest rate. The move is part of the economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year. But the agency has denied a request to raise such loan limits in Utah County.
Interest rates from government lending enterprises have long varied by county, and Utah County’s loan limits have been lower than Salt Lake County’s. But it’s time for this to change. There just isn’t any meaningful difference between higher-priced homes in northern Utah County and those of Salt Lake County.
To bolster the nation’s wobbling housing market, Congress this year approved a measure allowing special lower rates for costlier mortgages, but only in more expensive markets. Homes are grouped according to the government’s metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs. The MSAs provide census data that is useful for many things, just not for real estate.
For example, Salt Lake City’s MSA includes not only Tooele County but also Summit County, with its pricey homes. So people in the Salt Lake MSA are eligible for government enterprise loans up to $729,750.
That means qualifying homeowners in Draper or Bluffdale can get relatively low-rate mortgages, but cross the county line a short distance to Alpine or Highland and the approved amount plummets to $323,750. Commercial mortgage rates are a full point or more higher than FHA, for example, which means hundreds of dollars a month in mortgage costs to North County homeowners who, by most measures, are no different from their Salt Lake neighbors.
The domino effect is that uneven limits can hurt home sales more widely in Utah County. Home buyers will naturally tend to look first where the higher-limit government loans are available.
Part of the problem is that Utah County is judged as a whole. Inexpensive housing in Provo and Orem, especially student housing in Provo, drags down median prices. But nobody thinks Alpine fits a lower-price mold.
A deeper problem is how the lines were drawn. Looking back at how the loan limits were raised, it’s apparent the measure was drawn up hastily, as a panicky Congress looked at the slide in home prices and decided it had to act fast.
The economic stimulus measure was grafted onto the existing loan procedures, and — voila! — new guidelines for loans, based on the MSAs.
But MSAs seem to be meant for more general purposes by the Census Bureau, not for the narrow application in the stimulus law. Look at the oddities produced in the Salt Lake MSA. Now a bungalow in South Salt lake or a house in the western part of Tooele county is eligible for the same loans as a ritzy home in Park City. That underlines how arbitrary these numbers are.
Arbitrary numbers can and should be changed. If Park City can be considered a natural part of the Salt Lake City area, so can Alpine and Highland.
The Utah County Realtors organization plans to press its case again in mid-May with U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development officials at the annual convention of the National Association of Realtors. Local realtors will argue that, based on the most up-to-date sales figures for Utah County, the government loan limit should be raised from $323,750 to $729,750.
They have a solid case, and we urge federal lawmakers to grant this request. It’s time for the federal government to follow the spirit of the economic stimulus plan, and not get hung up in the fine print of outmoded regulations when it comes to Utah County.
Utah Fair Housing: 101
Utah Labor Commission.png
(KUTV) Salt Lake City – Do you know the laws around fair housing in Utah? Michael Barrett, Outreach & Education Coordinator with the Anti-Discrimination and Labor Division, stopped by the Fresh Living studio to fill us in on what laws renters, landlords, and home owners need to know.
You can learn more by going to laborcommission.utah.gov.
Utah’s Fair Housing Laws
Utah Labor Commission.png
(KUTV) Salt Lake City – Do you know the laws around fair housing in Utah? Michael Barrett, Outreach & Education Coordinator with the Anti-Discrimination and Labor Division, stopped by the Fresh Living studio to fill us in on what laws renters, landlords, and home owners need to know.
You can learn more by going to laborcommission.utah.gov.
Bluffdale, UT Hourly Weather
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Signed by the Governor: Michigan Bans “Material Support or Resources” for Warrantless Federal Surveillance
LANSING, Mich. (March 20, 2018) – On Monday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill that bans “material support or resources” for warrantless federal surveillance programs. This is an essential step every state needs to take at a time when the federal government seems unlikely to ever end unconstitutional spying on its own.
Rep. Martin Howrylak (R-Troy) introduced House Bill 4430 (HB4430) last spring. The new law prohibits the state and its political subdivisions from assisting, participating with, or providing “material support or resources, to a federal agency to enable it to collect, or to facilitate in the collection or use of a person’s electronic data” unless one of five conditions apply:
(a) The person has given informed consent. (b) The action is pursuant to a warrant that is based upon probable cause and particularly describes the person, place, or thing to be searched or seized. (c) The action is in accordance with a legally recognized exception to warrant requirements. (d) The action will not infringe on any reasonable expectation of privacy the person may have. (e) This state or a political subdivision of this state collected the electronic data or metadata legally.
The House approved the final version of HB4430 108-1. The Senate passed the measure 37-0. With Gov. Snyder’s signature, the new law goes into effect in 90 days.
“This reform safeguards the fundamental rights of all Michigan residents, who are guaranteed protection of their property and privacy rights by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,“ Howrylak said. “Michigan will not assist the federal government with any data collection unless it is consistent with the Constitution.”
FISA REAUTHORIZATION
Despite concerns about warrantless surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, Congress has done nothing to rein in NSA spying. In January, Congress reauthorized the FISA Sec. 702.
As Andrew Napolitano explained, “the FISA-created process permits a secret court in Washington to issue general warrants based on the government’s need to gather intelligence about national security from foreigners among us. It pretends that the standard is probable cause of foreign agency, but this has now morphed into the issuance of general warrants whenever the government wants them.” A typical FISA warrant authorizes government surveillance on all landlines, mobile devices and desktop computers in a given area. While the process was created to monitor foreign agents, it sweeps up reams of data belonging to Americans.
Before approving a six-year extension of Section 702, the House voted to kill an amendment that would have overhauled the surveillance program and addressed some privacy concerns. Provisions in the amendment would have required agents to get warrants in most cases before hunting for and reading Americans’ emails and other messages that get swept up under the program.
Just one day after Trump signed the extension into law, news came out about the infamous FISA memo. This memo was available to members of the House Intelligence Committee prior to the vote to reauthorize FISA. None of this information was made available to Congress at large. Most telling, every single Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee voted to reauthorize Sec. 702, and in a heartwarming show of bipartisanship, six of the nine Democratic representatives on the committee joined their colleagues.
This is yet another indication we can’t count on Congress to limit its spy-programs.
PRACTICAL EFFECT
The feds share and tap into vast amounts of information gathered at the state and local level through a program known as the “information sharing environment” or ISE. In other words, these partnerships facilitate federal efforts to track the movements of, and obtain and store information on, millions of Americans. This includes monitoring phone calls, emails, web browsing history and text messages, all with no warrant, no probable cause, and without the people even knowing it.
According to its website, the ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These analysts, operators, and investigators… have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies.” In other words, ISE serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered without a warrant.
Because the federal government relies heavily on partnerships and information sharing with state and local law enforcement agencies, passage of HB4430 potentially hinders warrantless surveillance in the state. For instance, if the feds wanted to engage in mass surveillance on specific groups or political organizations in Michigan, it will now have to proceed without state or local assistance. This will likely prove problematic.
State and local law enforcement agencies regularly provide surveillance data to the federal government through ISE and Fusion Centers. They collect and store information from cell-site simulators (AKA “stingrays”), automated license plate readers (ALPRs), drones, facial recognition systems, and even “smart” or “advanced” power meters in homes.
Passage of HB4430 sets the stage to end this sharing of warrantless information with the federal government. It would also prohibit state and local agencies from actively assisting in warrantless surveillance operations.
By including a prohibition on participation in the illegal collection and use of electronic data and metadata by the state, HB4430 will also prohibit what NSA former Chief Technical Director William Binney called the country’s “greatest threat since the Civil War.”
The bill bans the state from obtaining or making use of electronic data or metadata obtained by the NSA without a warrant.
Reuters revealed the extent of such NSA data sharing with state and local law enforcement in an August 2013 article. According to documents obtained by the news agency, the NSA passes information to police through a formerly secret DEA unit known Special Operations Divisions and the cases “rarely involve national security issues.” Almost all of the information involves regular criminal investigations, not terror-related investigations.
In other words, not only does the NSA collect and store this data. using it to build profiles, the agency encourages state and local law enforcement to violate the Fourth Amendment by making use of this information in their day-to-day investigations.
This is “the most threatening situation to our constitutional republic since the Civil War,” Binney said.
NSA FACILITIES
The original definition of “material support or resources” included providing tangible support such as money, goods, and materials and also less concrete support, such as “personnel” and “training.” Section 805 of the PATRIOT Act expanded the definition to include “expert advice or assistance.”
Practically-speaking, the legislation will almost certainly stop the NSA from ever setting up a new facility in Michigan.
In 2006, the agency maxed out the Baltimore-area power grid, creating the potential, as the Baltimore Sun reported, for a “virtual shutdown of the agency.” Since then, the NSA aggressively expanded in states like Utah, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere, generally focusing on locations that can provide cheap and plentiful resources like water and power.
For instance, analysts estimate the NSA data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, will use 46 million gallons of water every day to cool its massive computers. The city supplies this water based on a contract it entered into with the spy agency. The state could turn off the water by voiding the contract or refusing to renew it. No water would effectively mean no NSA facility.
What will stop the NSA from expanding in other states? Bills like HB4430. By passing this legislation, Michigan becomes much less attractive for the NSA because it will not be able to access state or local water or power supplies. If enough states step up and pass the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, we can literally box them in and shut them down.
LEGAL BASIS
HB4430 rests on a well-established legal principle known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. Simply put, the federal government cannot force states to help implement or enforce any federal act or program. The anti-commandeering doctrine is based primarily on four Supreme Court cases dating back to 1842. Printz v. US serves as the cornerstone.
“We held in New York that Congress cannot compel the States to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program. Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the States’ officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policy making is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.”