"For a biotech or software firm that sells all of its products out of the state, it would actually eliminate their Utah income tax," said Mike Jerman, vice president of the taxpayers association.

"These are high-paying jobs, and we want to encourage them," he said, adding the state would still reap the benefits of those employees' personal income, sales and property taxes. The expanding businesses themselves would still pay sales and property taxes.

And at $33 million, it will cost education a lot less than $200 million and get more "bang for the buck" in economic development, as Stephenson put it.

Removing what's been termed the "second gross receipts tax" on utilities is only fair, said Stephenson, who at one time compared what he called the grossly undemocratic manner in which the tax was imposed the last night of the 1995 Legislature to unlawful actions in Adolf Hitler's Germany.

The Legislature that year gave a property tax cut to all Utahns. But needing a few million dollars to balance out the next year's budget the last night of the session, legislative leaders decided not to reduce the utilities' taxes in a like manner, and so imposed an additional gross receipts tax. The gross receipts tax is used instead of property tax to get money from the nonprofit IPA, and lawmakers decided to impose it on Utah Power also to make it "fair."

Utah Power and IPA officials did not ask the Legislature to remove the tax, utility spokesmen testified to the task force earlier this year. Since utility taxes are factored into rate levels, approved by the Public Service Commission, it's only right that the $3.4 million be passed through to ratepayers in some form, task force members said.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com