A legislator wants to spend state money to preserve the state marriage commission. Federal funding, $700,000, that kept the thing alive has been pulled — that’s good, because everyone wants to work on cutting the federal debt, right? — but Rep. LaVar Christensen of Draper proposes that the state pick up the bill and keep the commission going. This includes creating a 17-member commission.

If I had $1 for every odd government commission I’d be moving into a Spanish castle.

We don’t even provide adequate classroom supplies in schools but we’re ready to set up a costly state marriage counseling service. In supposed times of austerity, the Legislature sure keeps dreaming up ways to blow money on things that should be left to individual, private and nonprofit activity.

Why do we need a new agency to promote Utah outdoor recreation tourism? We already have tourism and economic development offices. But, no, the governor and the Legislature want to create a new bureau to focus on economic development possibilities in outdoor recreation.

New offices and bureaus need directors, office staff, office space and other budget lines. If this new endeavor carries no cost increases, as the sponsors say, then we should believe anything. There is no good reason this program cannot be added to the role of one of the existing related departments. If necessary, existing low-return program efforts should be dropped to make room for focus on the outdoors push. We have enough offices and bureaus in state government.

Another option: If they’re determined to create a new agency, a low-priority agency elsewhere in the state bureaucracy should be killed off to pay for it. Well, don’t bank on it. Government almost never eliminates an agency. Only new ones are added. It’s in government DNA. People need to put a stop to it, because the lawmakers and executives we keep electing aren’t budging.

My favorite example is the federal Homeland Security Department. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, government launched into spasms of reaction, some good, some bad. One of the worst manifestations was the creation of the bloated Homeland agency. Its duties could have been assigned to existing federal departments. Instead, we got a huge new layer of bureaucracy with hideous, growing price tags. Homeland’s budget in 2002 was $19.5 billion, jumping to $37.7 billion in 2003. It was $56.9 billion in 2012 and the budget hog no doubt will continue to expand in perpetuity.

Now, on to South Weber. Scott Casas built a wind turbine attached to his garage, but he can’t use it yet. The city wants to regulate it.

Perhaps wind turbines in residential areas deserve some level of government regulation. That’s up for debate, in my view. But regardless of the answer, the mishmash of procedure, bureaucracy and delay Casas has been confronted with is ridiculous.

It’s like South Weber officials have been taking lessons from federal and state bureaucrats on how to gum up someone’s life for kicks.

Casas already has been forced to pay $800 in fees to South Weber. It will be two more months until the city council will even get to consider the city staff’s wind turbine regulation ordinance. The city manager says they want to make sure they are “doing it right.”

They are, if the goal is to provide a textbook case of a city nitpicking, obsessing, delaying and charging fees on what should be a simple matter. I wonder what else South Weber’s running through a quicksand gauntlet.

He said some of the right things in his State of the State speech Wednesday, but the time and emphasis spent on the gunk we breathe had an oh-by-the-way feel.

The governor rightfully crowed about the state’s economic recovery and development story. He also focused on education, as has every other Utah governor in living memory. Fair enough.

Utah recently endured another of those air inversions that trap pollutants in the Wasatch Front valleys. Nothing new. But with more pollution each time, we’re now racking up “worst air in the nation” achievements and drawing national attention to the damaging and even deadly health problem.

That’s why I was hoping Herbert would announce bold initiatives to attack the air quality slide. The nation’s worst air stank up the state throughout the tourism-heavy Sundance festival, for cough’s sake. That’s an economic development issue in itself if we’re not careful. What movie tourist really wants to spend a week or two in Utah breathing yellow stench that cuts months or years off the life span?

Late in his speech, the governor made a general call for all Utahns to do their part to help cut air pollution, things like carpooling, driving less, using mass transit and overall being more energy efficiency conscious. He also praised the Aggie Bus at Utah State University, an all-electric, emissions-free innovation on campus.

Absent, though, was any sort of direct challenge to industry to carry its weight in the air pollution situation. Rio Tinto Kennecott, for example, a major producer of air pollutants, may have warranted a mention, even if only a recognition that the company has taken some steps to cut emissions.

State government and business partnership websites have quite a bit of information about air quality and pollution problems, but not much sense of urgency.

It’s obvious the governor is aware of the situation and has taken some steps to address it. But it’s not enough, has a weak public profile and in the end doesn’t promise to put a serious dent in the sludge we must breathe.

A Utah doctors’ group has been making waves, and enemies among the industrialized and political establishment, with strident calls for major action to curb pollution. Here are some of the group’s recent recommendations, which seem to be falling on deaf ears:

“We advocate that all new electric energy supplies for the state of Utah should come from renewable resources.
“We want state-of-the-art controls on existing plants
“A reduction of the speed limit to 55mph when air pollution exceeds EPA limits
“Public subsidies for mass transit, free ridership and expanded service
“A 20% emissions reduction strategy by the Air Quality Board
“State funding for more extensive environmental monitoring;
“Strategies to increase public awareness about the negative health effects of air pollution
“Encouragement for school districts to use school buses that runs on alternative fuels
“Policies that prohibit school buses should from idling in school yards while waiting for students
“The establishment of air pollution warning indices that promote the safety of pregnant women and their unborn children.
“A goal of attaining 25% renewable energy sources by the year 2020
“Educate people about the sources of pollution and their health consequences
“Provide medical expertise to organizations working on urban planning, renewable power, increasing fuel efficiencies, and transportation alternatives.”

There’s also a petition drive urging Herbert to get going.

Are we going to continue to accept the grimy air, which demonstrably shortens lives, harms fetuses, increases health costs and cuts worker productivity? Or will the state government declare an end to its business-as-usual approach? A hot economy and better schools won’t be as valuable if the people in them can’t breathe.

But taken aback we were on Saturday after we noticed the Standard-Examiner epaper edition was not online by its customary deadline of 6 a.m.

The Standard contracts with an international company to optimize our printed paper for online viewing as the epaper edition, available at http://www.standard.net/digital. The epaper work is done overnight, after the printed pages run on the presses here in Ogden. The optimization can be done anywhere in the world, as long as the producers have the pdf images of our pages. Our newsroom sends those pages via ftp early each morning; then several hours later our readers see the optimized pages in the epaper.

This usually goes without hiccup, but Saturday morning we alerted our epaper provider that the edition was missing. We were told the company was suffering “production issues” and the edition would not be produced. Later, the company said it had suffered a “catastrophic system failure” and even our Sunday epaper production might be imperiled.

At that point our online department got to work on a backup presentation of the epaper. We posted the raw pdf files on our website here in Ogden and provided the emergency link for readers. Later Saturday, the regular epaper showed up online — good news, but contrary to what the company had told us earlier in the day.

Clearly, our provider was having a tough day, and we wondered what might gave gone wrong. Usually something described as a catastrophic system failure in computer parlance usually means major hardware, software and-or data problems have happened.

Also, we wondered if Hamas, the Middle Eastern terrorist group, might be involved. That’s because Olive Software, our U.S.-based provider, has some of its operations in Israel, which has been under rocket attack by Hamas from Gaza in recent days.

We finally found out Sunday. No computer meltdown. No Hamas rocket barrage. Olive also has a major production presence in Mumbai, India. It turns out that early on Saturday, Mountain time, a major longtime political figure in Mumbai, Bal Thackeray, died. The city immediately shut down in mourning, and Olive’s Indian workforce went home — leaving many of the company’s more than 200 epaper customers without updated editions.

Olive assembled backup production operations in three other locations to recover from what it now described as a “catastrophic staffing event” and was able to complete the Standard’s Sunday edition. Monday’s also was up on time.

Thackeray was cremated in Mumbai on Sunday, but work outages may not be over in Mumbai. Supporters of Thackeray were urging workers to take Monday off in another period of mourning.

Globalization demands attention be paid to local cultural conditions. As we found out, a shoe dropping in Mumbai can trip us up in Utah, if certain connections are in place.

What better way to take a break from the anxiety of Election Day than by biking the latest stretch of the Centennial Trail now open in Weber County? That’s what I did Tuesday, and as a result I have yet another favorite place to enjoy.

From the confluence of the Ogden and Weber rivers to 1900 West, a paved trail of almost four miles offers a tranquil route along the Weber, mostly hidden from the industrialized surroundings of that area of Marriott-Slaterville and West Haven.

I turned my battered mountain bike over a bridge walkway branching west from the Ogden River Parkway trail and headed northwest along the Weber. The trail skirts a junkyard and slips beneath noisy Interstate 15, but the ride’s mostly postcard-idyllic all the way to its terminus at 1900 West.

The new trail is another great accomplishment of community leaders, volunteers and recreation groups who have made the Ogden area’s jewel of a trail system a priority. Well done.

The city actually has a media policy requiring elected officials to copy in other city officials when they exchange emails with members of the public, including nosy reporters. This way, the city fathers note, they’re standing up for “transparency.” But in my view it’s actually a creepy tool to attempt to crush any dissent by inhibiting and channeling an individual council member’s communications with the outside.

Individual city council members are elected to represent the residents, not serve as part of a unified cadre operating under policy controls designed to squelch any discussion that strays off the party line. It’s eerie, even Nixonian, for the majority on the council that imposed this policy to attempt to monitor and guide the communications of a lone council member who is chafing under the limitation.

City council member Brent Taylor said he sees the policy as a suppression of his free speech rights. The rest of the council won’t budge on the email collating policy, so he’ll take his conversations to phone calls instead of email. Meantime, the city has been served with an open-records request for release of the emails in which Taylor was chewed out by his colleagues for having an email conversation out of school with a news reporter.

It’s creepy, it’s eerie, and it’s a sad situation when a local government suffers from such internal and external paranoia.

There’s no denying that gutter mouth disease is sweeping society. But in trying to stop the F-bombs in parks and recreation settings, Ogden City is acting in Big Brother fashion, seeking to control speech. What would be next, citing people who raise their voices above a certain decibel level? Its extension of existing disorderly conduct law to apply to foul mouths is also impractical. Officials would have to either enforce it randomly, thereby making it an abuse in its own right, or bust every crude yokel within hearing and so fill up the courts and, for repeat scofflaws, the jails. The proposed law is vague, too. Who is going to define “abusive, profane or indecent” language?

The city seems to be most concerned about players and parents freaking out at sporting events. There’s no need to try to criminalize such boorishness. Kick people out of events and even the dimmest offenders will eventually get the hint: Behave or you’re out.

Some states have gone off the deep end of disenfranchisement, imposing strict photo ID requirements. A new study indicates thousands of people in the strictest states lack the necessary ID, live more than 10 miles from a government office that issues a valid ID, and lack transportation to the office. Lawsuits have been filed challenging some of these laws as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, but still the 2012 general election will be a daunting gauntlet for many unsuspecting citizens.

Utah has enacted ID requirements but they’re not as onerous as those in dozens of other states. Here are the Utah rules:

A voter shall present valid voter identification to one of the poll workers.

Current valid UT driver’s license
Current valid identification card issued by the state or federal government
UT concealed weapon permit
U.S. passport
Current valid U.S. military ID card
Bureau of Indian Affairs card
Tribal treaty card
Tribal ID card

OR

Two forms of ID that bear the name of the voter and provide evidence that the voter resides in the precinct

The most vocal critics brand the ID crackdowns across the nation as an effort by conservative legislatures to suppress the vote by minorities and the poor — the two groups most likely to have any ID hurdles. Supporters demand strict legislation is vital to prevent large-scale voter fraud.

In practice, it’s almost insulting to require that people who’ve been registered to vote for decades are now being required to show their papers. Forget your driver’s license and you’re sent away or made to fill out a provisional ballot, which requires a trip within a few days to the clerk’s office with your proof.

While queuing to vote in the primary election last month, I was mortified to observe what happened to an older man in a wheelchair. The poll workers asked him for government-issued picture ID, hopefully a driver’s license. “I don’t drive,” he said, pointing to his legs. Far from a sinister figure, the guy probably was just there to vote for Sen. Orrin Hatch for the 20th time. But our increasingly paranoid world of red tape, in search of a bogeyman under every rock, put him off on the hassle and denial track.

People keep hollering that their freedom’s being taken away and we’re headed toward dictatorship. If they want to stay free and stop dictators, fighting for easy access to the voting booth would be a good place to start.

As it happens, there’s a healthy debate in Utah about how law enforcement conducts drug raids. Public scrutiny of police operations is a check and balance against potential overzealous police operations and policies. But taking this general issue all the way to the other end to codify justifiable shooting of officers is craziness.

Police already have a frightening, dangerous job. Holding out a potential free pass for gunmen to shoot first is only a recipe for making some officers trigger-happy. Indiana defense attorneys are drooling.

The National Rifle Association worked through its flunkies in the Indiana Legislature to pass the shoot-a-cop law. Gov. Mitch Daniels, touted as a Republican vice presidential nominee, signed the bill into law. Thanks, NRA. I’m sure similar laws will be sprouting in other states now. The gun lobby apparently won’t be happy until it’s Tombstone on American streets.

One example: The Pakistani doctor who helped us find Osama bin Laden just got sentenced to 35 years in prison for it. His government considers his role leading up to the operation in which U.S. Navy Seals killed the terrorist as a high treason.

Meanwhile, bin Laden’s wives and daughters who were taken into custody after the raid have received slaps on their wrists. They washed Osama’s underwear and cooked his meals — and helped the globally notorious terrorist stay hidden. They get a wink and a free pass, in effect.

We need to find some better friends.