Preliminary election results indicate Amendments B and C will both pass

SALT LAKE CITY — Voters across the Beehive State let their collective voices be heard on amendments B and C, the only amendments on the ballot after Utah’s courts voided amendments A and D from the ballot because they violated the state Constitution.

Preliminary election results released Tuesday night indicate that both amendments will pass.

As of Tuesday night, 71.2% of voters whose ballots had been tallied voted in favor of Amendment B and 81.4% of voters whose ballots have been tallied voted in favor of Amendment C. The Associated Press has officially called that Amendment C will pass.

Polling from October showed that Utahns were split on Amendment C, but there was high support for Amendment B.

Amendment B

Amendment B proposes an increase on the cap on distributions from Utah’s Permanent State School Fund — an endowment created to support public schools — from 4% to 5%, which would increase annual distributions by approximately 13%, or $14 million.

The fund hit a record $3.3 billion in May, setting up Utah’s public schools to receive a record $106 million distribution from the fund for the current school year.

Throughout the election cycle, some of Utah’s biggest and most influential education associations and advocacy groups supported Amendment B and continually asked Utahns to vote in favor of the change.

“It’s providing more funding for the children now and not into the future,” Corey Fairholm, Utah PTA president, told KSL.com. “We feel that it is important to give the money to education now so that the children, you know, are being able to reach their potential and have education funding.”

The Utah PTA is the largest child advocacy group in the state, with over 77,000 volunteer members during the 2022-23 school year. It was joined in its support of Amendment B by the Utah State Board of Education, Utah Education Association, Utah School Boards Association, Utah School Superintendents Association, Utah Rural Schools Association and Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks.

The Utah Education Association — Utah’s largest teachers association, made up of 18,000 educators across the state — said in May it supports the amendment to raise the cap to ensure “sustainable, equitable funding for all of Utah’s public school students today and in the future.”

“The record-setting fund puts Utah in an enviable position of needing to raise the constitutional distributional cap. We believe the fund is in good standing because of the structures created by the state Legislature, comprising a professional board to manage physical assets and an entity to oversee financial assets,” Utah Education Association President Renée Pinkney said in a statement to KSL.com in September.

Over 30 years, Utah’s Permanent State School Fund fund has grown from just $50 million to $3.3 billion today, a growth that “illustrates why Utah’s Trust System management is one of the most respected in the nation,” Land Trusts Protection and Advocacy Director Kim Christy said in a statement.

Amendment C

Amendment C asked whether the position of elected county sheriff should be enshrined in the Utah Constitution.

“We want the office of sheriff in the state of Utah to remain elected forever,” the president of the Utah Sheriffs’ Association, Tracy Glover, told KSL-TV. He also said every sheriff in the state supports this change.

“Over the years, we’ve seen a few states that have attempted to make sheriffs appointed, more like police chiefs,” Glover said.

As it stood before Tuesday, county sheriffs were elected, but the requirement was only in state law. Glover, who’s also the Kane County sheriff, said the group wanted the position to be constitutionally protected.

Glover said the change wouldn’t give sheriffs any new power they don’t already have.

“We kept the language very simple to try to just simply protect the office of sheriff as elected in the Constitution,” he said.