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State lawmakers cut $272 million from the state budget Friday during a special session.
Nearly every state agency except public education will receive a 3 percent budget cut to make up for the projected revenue shortfall.
The cuts include reduced funding for Medicaid, the arts and services for people with disabilities.
Some open positions in the Utah Highway Patrol and state prison system also won't be filled, while others will be eliminated.
"We had to get to this point, but it does not come without costs," said House budget chairman Ron Bigelow. "The issue of it impacting people is very real."
Earlier this year, legislators passed a record $11.6 billion budget. But the slumping economy is leading to a decline in revenue. Utah's economy has primarily been hampered by a slowdown in the housing and construction industry, according to state economists.
While Utah continues to have positive job growth and relatively low unemployment rate, it has failed to maintain the robust growth state officials expected when they wrote the budget last winter.
One lawmaker on the key Executive Appropriations Committee told KSL, of 25,000 state employees, perhaps 100 will lose their jobs. He says agencies are tightening their budgets in part through attrition and retirements.
Some raised concerns that health and human services should be spared rather than things like infrastructure and roads. But leaders in both houses said they felt sharing the pain across the board was most fair.
Sen. Lyle Hillyard said, "Is it painful? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Are there cuts that are going to impact people? Yes. But that's the reality of life. We have the money, and thank goodness we have a constitutional provision that we have to balance our budget, and so we do that."
Rep. Roz McGee said, "It is inappropriate to subject health and human services to the same level of cuts, that 3 percent across the board, as some other agencies whose missions are not direct services to people in trouble."
"I think it's shortsighted," said Rep. Christine Johnson. "Those people end up in the emergency room if they don't receive the kind of care they need, and we'll end up paying for it anyway."
None of the cuts are coming from public education, at least for now. But that could change in the months ahead.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report. Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
E-mail: jdaley@ksl.com
