The winners and the losers

• Loser: The companies responsible for spray-painting two dogs recently while marking buried utility lines should be held to account. One of the dogs was struck in the eyes, which has forced his owner to spend a lot of money on prescription eye drops. The other was sprayed in the face, but only on its fur.

The folks who did this have been slow to take responsibility, or to even acknowledge what they have done. One company spokeswoman said a worker felt threatened by one of the dogs, although it was separated from him in a fenced yard. In that case, spray paint in the eye was a sorry solution to a perceived problem.

• Winner: Public projects seldom finish early, but that was the case with the new car-pool lanes along I-15 in Utah County. They opened Friday, not in July, as originally expected. That means commutes south of Point of the Mountain will pick up dramatically now. It also means the Wasatch Front has 38 miles of continuous car-pool lanes, which the state says is the longest such stretch in the nation.

Now it's up to people to pile into their cars so they can take advantage. Or, they can wait until the state's new high-occupancy toll lane program is running and pay a little extra for the privilege.