Utah News

To encourage safe cycling and to promote road respect throughout the state, bicyclists in Utah are taking to the roads this week.

The 2012 Road Respect Tour commenced in Beaver on Monday morning and the tour made it through Cedar City and St. George by the day's end. The tour is moving through Panguitch and Richfield and will continue through Saturday with the final stop in Logan, where a Road Rally at the historic Logan Court House will allow the public to celebrate the riders.

Governor Gary Herbert has issued a new executive order for state employees to turn off the ignition when they’re not driving.

The order requires more than 7,300 state vehicles to be turned off when drivers expect to be idling more than 30 seconds. Sam Lee, Director of the Utah Division of Fleet Operations, says the move will curb vehicle emissions, thus helping clear the valley’s notorious smog. And it’s good for the bottom line.

Bianca Morrison Dillard and her husband are devout Latter-Day Saints: “My husband and I teach primary in our local ward and I grew up LDS and it’s always been something that’s been very important to me.”

But Sunday, Morrison Dillard and her husband had to excuse themselves from church to participate in what she calls an important act of discipleship: walking in the 2012 Pride Parade.

A new experiment could expand the population of Utah’s state fish, the Bonneville cutthroat trout.

Paul Thompson, Division of Wildlife Resources aquatics manager for the Northern Region, says they’re collecting eggs and sperm from the trout out of Logan River’s Temple Fork, spawning them on site and transporting them to experimental streamside incubation boxes on the river’s Right-Hand Fork, where water will be pumped into them.

In the basement of the Franklin County Courthouse, where we would be safe from any form of severe weather, people from northern Utah and southeast Idaho are training to become weather spotters. Weather-wise it's a calm night in Preston and a little stuffy in the basement meeting room where John Keyes, from the National Weather Service office in Pocatello, is explaining what kinds of weather conditions should be reported by the volunteer spotters:

Thursday afternoon Washington Square was being transformed. Dozens of workers spent the day putting up tents and setting up food carts for what Michael Westley, Spokesman for the Utah Pride Center, says will be the largest Pride celebration ever.

“This will be absolutely a record breaker. We estimated about 28,000 attended last year, we had about 25,000 paid ticket sales and we are expecting that number to go well above 30,000.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded local governments along the Wasatch Front more than a million dollars to help clean up and revitalize blighted property. Here's how Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County and Ogden plan to use the EPA Brownfields grants given to 245 communities nationwide.

With major development underway along North Temple in Salt Lake City, including construction of the Airport TRAX line, Mayor Ralph Becker says this money is a huge leg up for the process.

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch teamed up with a Wyoming lawmaker this week to highlight his efforts to get the gray wolf removed from the Endangered Species List. Some local groups strongly support this plan, while some think it's the wrong path for Utah.

Small business leaders in Utah had the opportunity yesterday to let two Western federal lawmakers know what economic issues impact them the most. Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho joined Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah at Zions Bank Tower in downtown Salt Lake City to hear from local business leaders about what’s impeding job growth and profits. Crapo says the number one obstacle is the U.S. tax code:

“Our tax code is probably the most unfair, complex, expensive to comply with and anti-competitive code we could have come up with and our businesses are facing that.”