OHV users may face new fee to fund injury rehabilitation – Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY A Utah lawmaker touted advances in spinal cord injury rehabilitation Friday as he presented a bill to direct new funding from off-highway vehicle users to an injury rehabilitation fund.

Rep. Eric Hutchings, R-Kearns, found support from a number of injured and paralyzed members of the community, but drew the opposition of OHV enthusiasts.

HB359 would impose an additional 50-cent fee for off-highway vehicle registrations to directly contribute to the Spinal Chord and Brain Injury Rehabilitation Fund.

Hutchings cited OHV accidents as a leading cause for such injuries.

"When people are disabled to the point where they cannot function, we step up. Society as a whole has determined that we are not going to leave these people," Hutchings told the House Transportation Committee. "Several years ago, we created a fund that would pull money from the back-end and put it to the front-end."

Hutchings referred to the previously established Traumatic Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Rehabilitation Fund and said activities that are most likely to have those injuries would be expected to fund and help pay for potential injury treatment.

"We have only added fees to activities that are directly causing and we can directly show are causing these kinds of injuries," he said, calling the fund a "pay-to-play" policy.

Hutchings assured the committee that the measure would establish a fund of "last resort" for when patients have already exhausted their own means of medical treatment.

He said previous funding efforts have been successful in returning 71 percent of people with spinal and brain injuries to school and work at a functional level.

Dr. Dale Hull, the executive director of the Neuroworx outpatient paralysis care center and a rehabilitated quadriplegic, spoke in favor of the bill.

"The rehabilitation fund has been a godsend for individuals who have no resources, who exhaust their insurance and who have the potential to make progress, who otherwise would have just been forced to make a decision to stop therapy," Hull said.

Opponents of the measure stated their support for the fund but not its source.

Wesley Tyler, of Roy, said the so-call "pay-to-play" fund singles out one activity that can cause spinal or brain injuries.

"We are not asking the skiers, the bicyclists, the hikers, the climbers (to pay)," he said.

Tyler, an off-highway vehicle user, described his community as the "easy target" to cover costs of the fund.

"We need to get creative in how we fund this because I would like to see this go through, but not the way it is right now," said Glenn Olsen, president of the Public Lands Equal Access Alliance. "I would like to see the funding come from various sources."

Hutchings said the decision to attach the fees to OHVs is a "baby step" to prove that a larger fund could work.

The committee voted to pass the bill forward to the full House for consideration.

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OHV users may face new fee to fund injury rehabilitation - Deseret News