Utah is seeing near-record tax surpluses this year — perhaps as much as $300 million by the time the state's fiscal year ends June 30. In the first four months of this fiscal year, taxes are already coming in $90 million above estimates.

Last year the state took in $400 million more in revenue that it had budgeted, much of it spent during the 2005 Legislature. But no tax cuts were given as lawmakers tried to make up for slow growth in critical budgets during the down-turn in the early 2000s, give decent employee pay raises and funnel $90 million more into road repairs and construction.

Over the past 10 years, the state budget has grown by 62 percent. And conservative legislators want tax cuts to slow the growth of government.

GOP legislative leaders are uniformly now calling for a tax cut next year, which is an election year for all of the 75-member House members and half of the 29-member Senate.

Republican senators are believed to be looking more favorably on Huntsman's $60 million tax cut. But as Curtis said, House GOP leaders want more.

The burgeoning surplus has clearly changed Huntsman's tax cut ideas. Even as the surplus grew this summer and fall, Huntsman said repeatedly he wasn't ready to support general tax cuts.

The governor did, however, promise to "remain open-minded" on the issue and backed a plan to help low-income Utahns with the sales tax on food. Despite his campaign pledge to remove the unpopular tax entirely, he never put forward his own plan.

In a campaign questionnaire handed in to the Deseret Morning News last year, then-candidate Huntsman advocated taking increased sales tax collections from catalog and Internet sales to make up part or all of the $166 million the state would lose by removing the food tax. Huntsman has not pushed that method since, however, although leading legislators are now considering it.

Huntsman's own effort at reforming the state income tax, a "flatter, fairer" plan that established a single, lower rate for taxpayers and eliminated several deductions, would have reduced revenue collections by around $10 million dollars. That plan has been morphed by legislators into a $23 million tax cut, and Mower says Huntsman is "very happy" with it.

'Unmet needs'

Utahns polled for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV in June said they'd rather see the record surpluses spent on state programs than used to fund a tax cut. The survey by Dan Jones & Associates found then that only 29 percent wanted tax cuts.

But tax surpluses have grown since — and GOP lawmakers clearly will pass some kind of tax relief in the 2006 general session, which starts Jan. 16.