Hilton says her advocacy group has been attempting to persuade the county and cities with large numbers of payday lenders to similarly restrict the number of stores, and to do so in a way that would not merely chase them from just over one border to another.

Trouble booming?

As the number of payday lenders has grown, credit counselors and others say problems caused by them have increased, too.

Don Hester, co-owner of the Debt Free Consumer counseling service in Provo, says that when he tabulated data about his clients, he found: "The percentage of people trapped by payday loans increases about 400 percent per year."

Different credit counselors report different levels of problems with payday lenders, but all say it tends to be serious.

Preston Cochrane, executive director of AAA Fair Credit Foundation, says the percentage of people his agency helps who have payday loan problems "is high. It used to be more medium. . . . We have seen it increase, definitely, over the last two years. It's a reflection of how many new offices are opening up. . . . If they have one payday loan, they tend to have three to five."

Hester says at Debt Free Consumer, "Approximately 15 percent of people who seek counseling have one or more payday loans. Few people will have one payday loan. Generally, they will have anywhere from five to 20 loans, all from different payday companies."

Mike Peterson, vice president of the American Credit Foundation, says only about 5 percent of the people counseled by his foundation have payday loan problems, but the problems that are found are usually serious.

"They end up in a vicious cycle. They figure they will go in one time to fix a little emergency, and end up going back month after month," he said.

Michele Morin, a consumer protection lawyer who works with debt counseling, says among people she has helped with bankruptcy, "almost all of them had trouble with payday loans," and also reports seeing increased percentage of people with such problems.

Pignanelli says, however, that 20 years ago — before payday lenders appeared in the state — "Utah had the highest rate of bankruptcies in the nation. It still has the highest rate of bankruptcies in the nation. So I don't think you can blame people's financial problems here on the (payday loan) industry."

Profit boom

Pignanelli says the booming payday loan industry is making a lot of money. But no one knows exactly how much it is making in Utah. The state does not require lenders to report such things as how many loans they make, how many they must write off or how much profit they make.

Pignanelli says his industry association in Utah also does not compile such information.

But nationally, the industry's Consumer Credit Foundation said 22,000 payday loan stores nationally in 2002 made an estimated 180 million payday loans valued at $45 billion.