Charter schools are public schools.  State owned facilities, including charter schools, do not pay property taxes.  Facilities leased by the state or one of its subdivisions do have to pay property taxes.  Many states have exemptions for state facility leases, which would include schools, but Utah currently does not.

This is especially problematic for charter schools that are built by a developer as a stand-alone facility.  Charter schools leasing one of these new facilities must bear the added burden of paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in property tax expense.  Many schools have dreamed of having a waiver.  While there is no waiver, the summary below describes how schools may be able to take advantage of the property tax exemption by structuring their transaction appropriately. 

You can preview the overview below or download the document as a PDF here. 

The State of Utah and more particularly the Republican Party have been in the throws of a knock-down, drag-out fight over the nomination process for candidates. Count My Vote initiated a movement to replace party conventions with primaries. The movement spawned Senate Bill 54 which allowed candidates to choose between collecting signatures with the option to bypass the party convention and still appear on the primary ballot or securing enough votes at the party convention as a requirement to appear on the primary ballot.

Count My Vote proponents want to increase voter participation, represent the voice of the people, and eliminate party control of the ballot. These are all positive outcomes that resonate with many in our State. Some have been confused or frustrated by the Republican Party's challenge of SB54 and County My Vote. They see the party's fight as evidence that it wants less voter participation, less representation of the people's voice, and control of the ballot.

The real debate is not over the desired outcomes, but rather the process to achieve those outcomes. The Republican Party also wants more voter participation, to be representative, and for Republicans to choose their candidates with party officials acting as independent referees.

Process and rules are important. They can be boring. They may often seem irrelevant, but they are what creates a level playing field for the party's number one responsibility--candidate nomination and election. Process and rules make the elections and governance inclusive for both urban and rural areas. For a clear illustration of the importance of process, look at the current Republican Presidential nomination. As of today, it appears Donald Trump will not secure a majority of the delegates at the Republican Convention in Cleveland. So why not just make him the nominee because he has the most support (but not a majority)?

Delegates to the Republican National Convention are not allocated simply by popular vote. To do so would render rural areas irrelevant. It was for this reason the Founders compromised in the establishment of Congress with two chambers inclusive of the Senate (equal representation regardless of population) and a House of Representatives (representation by population). Similarly, while we watch the popular vote for President in the general election, we count based on the Constitution's process for electing a president embodied in the Electoral College. To simply count the popular votes would disenfranchise the small population states and marginalize the compromise represented in our Constitution.

George Will with the Washington Post explained the importance of the Convention in establishing a level playing field for presidential candidates and getting to a majority support as opposed to nominating a candidate without a majority.

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/3795372-155/will-the-gift-of-trumps-ramshackle

In an editorial authored by seven prior National Chairmen of the Republican National Committee published April 21, 2016 in the Wall Street Journal, they made a parallel argument.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-get-this-straight-about-the-convention-1461193740 (subscription required).

Imagine if the Speaker of the House suggested that it would pass a law that had more support than any other version of the law, but could not secure a majority vote on the House floor. We would be outraged--49% is not the same as 51%. Even 50.0% is not a majority whereas 50.1% is. Resolving pluralities (support from most, but not a majority) is a thorny problem in elections and legislative processes. We do not recognize pluralities as the will of the people. There is simply a stalemate until a majority can be reached. Resolving pluralities (without a majority) requires an effective process.

It is for this reason that the Republican National Convention all of a sudden becomes not only relevant, but necessary. Without the convention, we have a plurality with no way to get to a majority. For the same reasons, state and county conventions are also relevant and necessary. If there are problems with the process used in the conventions, we should change those processes, not circumvent the convention. The reason the Utah Republican Party has fought so aggressively against SB54 is to preserve the convention and its ability to break plurality stalemates and come to a majority behind a nominee.

I am confident that as a party and as Utahans, we will work through the disagreement over the elections process and come to a positive solution because we share the same desire to increase voter participation, have a representative process, and let voters decide who is on the ballot.

Capital Expenditures are a unique challenge in state budgets because subdivisions of the state are rarely charged for using the state’s debt or equity for facilities, equipment, and other investment needs. In an effort to take advantage of the current resource allocation process, state subdivisions lobby for capital expenditure appropriations. The result is an inefficient distribution of resources for capital expenditures within state budgets where the most connected, best funded lobbying efforts frequently win. This paper proposes changing the capital resource allocation processes by attaching a cost to state appropriated capital expenditures in an effort to increase accountability and efficiency while improving the long-term credit strength of the state.

The US Forest Service today is not the Forest Service our parents and grandparents knew.  Below is a Dixie National Forrest map from 1962.  The text is more interesting than the map.  The first line reads "You, as a citizen of the United States, are joint owner of this mountainous area".  It goes on to highlight the recreation, private resorts, wildlife, timber, forage, and energy development in the area.

Some quotes from the Forest Service map:

• "About 29 Million board feet of timber can be harvested year after year on the Dixie National Forrest indefinitely."
• "Roads built to harvest timber provide access to recreation and scenic areas."
• "The forage crop on the Dixie National Forest is harvested by about 20,000 cattle and 37,000 sheep.  These animals belong to approximately 400 farm and ranch families that depend upon summer grazing to round out their livestock operations."
• "Practically all of the Dixie National Forest is open to mineral prospecting and oil and gas exploration.  Coal and iron ore deposits have been mined for many years in southern Utah.  Over one million acres on Dixie National forest have been leased for oil exploration within the last few years."

The multiple use philosophy embraced by the forest service in 1962 in no way resembles the forest service management philosophies of today.  Unfortunately, many of the policies limit access, reduce recreation opportunities, and eliminate economic activities.

If you want a PDF copy of this map, email me at [email protected].

In my last 12 months at ConocoPhillips, we did some significant work on quantifying the process and impact of trade entry errors.  It was surprising to see how data entry errors could drive metrics like Value at Risk and P&L. 

I hadn't thought about this for a long time, but I was going through my desk last night and found my notes from when I presented at Energy Risk, the premier energy risk management conference held annually in Houston, Tx.  I co-authored the paper published in the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) magazine below with Kevin Kindall and Xianqiao Chen.

We wrote a pretty good paper.  What was better, was I had built a model to analyze the daily mark-to-market P&L by business unit or for the entire trade floor.  It gave us the ability to see daily profit and loss changes grouped by price changes, new transactions, and data entry errors.  I don't have PDF copy of that model.  I'll have to scan the one that is in my folder.