KVNUFTP

UTA tours Europe while everyone else scrimps

In a time when everyone from the Utah Government to you reading this is doing everything they can to save a few pennies here and there in the budgets, the Utah Transit Authority is spending your tax dollars to take lengthy European trip.

The itinerary of nine UTA managers and board members, a member of the business community and three mayors reads more like a luxury European vacation than a relevant fact-finding mission: Vienna, Munich, Zurich, Nice and Bordeaux. Don’t forget the “incidental stops” in Monaco and Paris.

Linda Hilton, an advocate for the poor at Salt Lake City’s Crossroads Urban Center, sums it up best.

“Everybody’s cutting back, economizing and slimming down, and these guys are off to Europe? … If [riders] knew their fare increases were being used to pay for UTA officials, who already make large sums of money, to go to Europe, they would be upset.”

The European trip was supposedly used to look at European streetcars, similar versions of which could be used in the future to create vital links to the UTA system along the Wasatch Front.

In these tough times though I find it extremely hard to believe that a similar fact-finding mission couldn’t have been accomplished through a phone call and a PowerPoint presentation, especially since the economy likely precludes UTA from making any major streetcar purchases anytime soon.

We’re on the cusp of the Legislature having to cut the bejeezus out of our state budget, and UTA is going around pulling crap like this? It hardly seems appropriate.