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Subcommittee staff unveils online tools and outlines 5% reduction target for Transportation budget
Summary
Legislative fiscal staff showed a new COBie subcommittee page and a fee dashboard to help lawmakers review line items and proposed fees, and said the Executive Appropriations Committee asked the panel to identify roughly $20.9 million in ongoing state-fund reductions (5% of the committee's ongoing state funds).
The Transportation and Infrastructure Appropriations Subcommittee opened its Jan. 21 meeting with a staff overview of resources legislators will use during the 2026 General Session.
Sean Faherty, a fiscal finance manager with the Office of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst, walked members through the subcommittee's COBie page and budget.utah.gov tools, saying the live Compendium of Budget Information and a new fee dashboard will let members filter proposed fees, view fee histories and compare estimated program revenue to program costs. Faherty said materials and an 'issues' tab will be updated daily so members can locate requests for appropriation and reduction proposals.
Faherty also told the committee that the Executive Appropriations Committee asked subcommittees to identify 5% ongoing reductions in state funds. For this subcommittee, staff calculated that target at about $20,900,000 in ongoing state funds (general fund and income tax fund). He described the staff'compiled reduction options as starting points — agency-submitted and staff-generated ideas that the committee may accept, modify or replace — and emphasized no reductions had been adopted during the meeting.
Representative questions focused on fee descriptions and how the dashboard calculates estimated revenue; staff said some legacy justification text will be cleaned up and noted the dashboard's revenue estimates are simple quantity-times-amount calculations that can differ from actual program revenues. The committee approved minutes from Oct. 14 as a procedural matter and moved on to scheduled presentations.
The subcommittee will use COBie and the fee dashboard to prioritize proposed increases and reductions and to assemble an increase list for funding requests that could be considered for reallocation by EAC.
