Inversion Conversion: GOP legislature budgeted more than $29 million to improve Utah's air

One call changed everything. It was the year 2011, and Rep. Steve Handy, R-Layton, was driving in South Weber when his cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. Handy pulled over to the side of the road. The angry caller told Handy he had asthma—what was the first-term state legislator going to do to improve Utah's air quality?

"I said, 'What do you mean?' I can't legislate geography, I can't move the mountains,'" Handy says, remembering the caller did not take that response well. "He swore at me."

It was a flippant comment, Handy admits. But then he started thinking about his childhood and all the times hazy air had affected his life. Like one winter evening in the early '60s, when Handy, his sister and his father were visiting their family in Holladay. After the soiree, the trio piled into their dad's 1960 Pontiac Bonneville to drive back to their home in Ogden. The inversion made that trek difficult. "On the way out of there, it was, 'Oh my gosh, how are we gonna get back?'" Handy recalls. "It was pea soup that you couldn't see in."

Handy and his sister, 12 and 10 years old at the time, put on their jackets, got out of the car and guided their dad to an intersection so he could orient himself and get them home. They walked slowly through the cold and the muck as their dad drove slowly behind them. "You could see better outside the car than in the car," Handy explains. "The headlights were not helpful. It was so thick, so you relied upon human eyesight."

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