The first week of the 2025 Legislative Session wrapped up last Friday. Several bills are already making their way out of the Senate and into the House. One bill of note that could have an impact on citizens is SB73 Statewide Initiatives Amendments. Sponsor, Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, is “proposing to modify the requirements for a statewide initiative application and a fiscal impact statement in relation to funding a law proposed by initiative.”

“When the citizens of Utah are exercising their legislative power as contained in the constitution, this bill ensures that both legislative bodies have similar processes when it comes to placing items for the voters’ approval,” said Fillmore during the debate on the Senate floor. “Voters need to know what’s in the bill and how much the policy would cost.”

Initiative filers identify what may be favorable in their own eyes, said Sen. Nate Blouin, D-Salt Lake City. “This might disrupt services in the state if they’re allowed to make those decisions up front without a lot of fiscal analysis.” 

Those who file initiative petitions have been working for months or even years on it, said Fillmore. “They can scrub the budget and find out what they like and don’t like. I suppose if someone doesn’t like how many police officers there are we’re going to cut the budget of the Highway Patrol. They’re probably going to have a hard time passing such an initiative.”

They’ll have to look at the budget to determine if there’s something that's a lower priority and make a proposal to see if the voters agree, he said.

“I think it could present some interesting proposals," said Blouin. “(For example) some could be legislators’ salaries. Some along those lines.”

It raises a red flag on the potential of things that might be popular, he said. “It seems like a departure from how we as legislators file and pass bills. It seems like we’re creating a higher threshold for initiatives than we have up here and that’s kind of the whole nexus of this issue I think.”

“In the legislature we cannot pass any bill that costs more than $25,000 to implement without finding a funding source and where it fits in the budget,” Fillmore said. “We have to find that money in our budget. We don’t even permit ourselves to vote on that bill until that happens. It just puts the same in place for citizen initiatives.”

“When I look at this bill and the steps we’re asking people to take to assert their voice in this process it seems to be becoming more onerous for them,” said Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Salt Lake City. “What additional steps have been added to the initiative process?”

“There’s only one,” said Fillmore. “Citizens need to identify a funding source. Where is the money going to come from to pay for this? By raising a tax? By how much will it go up? If it’s going to come from something in the state budget, then what other item in the state budget is it going to come from?”

Voters need to know what choice they’re making, he said. “Sometimes citizen initiatives can look like sunshine and rainbows. That’s great, people want sunshine and rainbows. But what if having sunshine and rainbows means we have to eliminate ice cream?”

Budgeting is the process of finding room for competing good things, said Fillmore. “We fund some good things up here. But we don’t fund a lot of other good things because there’s no room in the budget. This simply asks that for citizen initiatives, citizens be informed about what those choices are.”

“I believe the voice of the people is important,” said Riebe. “If this is going to hinder their ability to run an initiative, I feel like it’s our job to find the money – not their job to find the money because we have a better understanding of the budget. That’s why they send us up here, to find the budget. I believe it is onerous and taxing for the average citizen from being a part of the government. We should be beholden to the people’s voice in the people’s house.” 

“When we decide to fund priority A, we automatically cannot fund priority X,” Fillmore said. “This bill is not in any way to limit the ability of citizens to engage in their constitutionally granted legislative power. I like that our constitution in Utah makes it clear that all political power resides with the people. They delegate that power to the legislature but also retain it to themselves so they can keep us in line if we step out of it.”

SB73 passed out of the Senate and headed to the House with a vote of 21-7.