As car prices and monthly payments climb, small maintenance oversights can turn into major expenses. What drivers often miss, and why it matters more now.

When families cannot afford homes near their jobs, the daily math becomes brutal. Commutes stretch longer. Childcare costs pile up. Mortgages consume more of a household’s income. The result is what economists call “house-poor” families—people who technically own a home but have almost nothing left over to live on.

The obvious question is: why isn’t this being fixed?

The trek into the office is a necessary evil for many employees; unpaid time that could be spent elsewhere. But some state employees are able to cash in on their commutes.

That includes one member of Gov. Spencer Cox’s cabinet who heads the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement. The department oversees a number of civic and social programs ranging from museums, libraries and the state historical society, to volunteerism efforts and multicultural affairs. 

The employee’s in-state travel expenses made up a large chunk of the department’s employee reimbursements in recent years, according to documents obtained by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project obtained through a public records request. 

The UIJP reviewed spreadsheets detailing the reimbursed expenses of the department’s 17-person leadership team over the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years. 

The analysis showed one employee, Executive Director Donna Law, accounted for nearly a third of the team’s reimbursements in 2024 and 43% in 2025. Law, who lives in Cedar City, spent more than 11 times the average amount spent by all other employees included in the analysis. 

The majority of Law’s expenses were categorized as in-state travel, which includes mileage and lodging. Between the two years, she spent $21,607.94 on lodging, $10,135.42  on auto mileage, and $1,455.00 in miscellaneous travel expenses and meals for a total of over $33,000. 

The next highest amount spent on in-state travel was $3,385. Law’s overall spending far exceeded any other employee.

The nearly $36,000 Law spent on travel and other items wasnearly three times that spent by the employee with the second highest amount in reimbursements. His expenses, in contrast, were largely out-of-state travel.

In 2012, Jabari Parker, a top high school prospect and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was facing his biggest decision to that point in his life: where to play college basketball. 

Fans of BYU athletics hoped and perhaps prayed that Parker would pick the school owned by the church he was raised in. BYU was listed as one of his final choices. But he ultimately chose to spend his college years at Duke before attempting a career in the NBA. BYU fans were disappointed, but no one was truly surprised. Duke over BYU was the best choice for a young prospect in 2012. 

A.J. Dybantsa.

What changed between 2012 and 2024 when A.J. Dybantsa, the number one high school prospect, chose BYU over every other school? The answer is roughly $7 million dollars. That is what Dybantsa is reportedly making to play basketball at BYU. 

The deal was supported by Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith, who met multiple times with the Dybantsa family in multiple attempts to bring the young player to Provo. 

According to Smith, he had no financial role in bringing Dybantsa to BYU, but the influence of Utah’s most famous billionaire acting as a “booster” or unofficial recruiter certainly swayed the decision.

Prior to 2021, boosters acting as recruiters was taboo to the NCAA governing body. It was called improper recruiting. But in 2021, California began the modern era of NIL, or the ability of a college athlete to benefit from their name, image, or likeness, when they passed the “Fair Pay to Play Act.” 

This new law gave college athletes in California the ability to benefit from their NIL, something that was banned in the rest of the country to that point. The NCAA saw that this law would create an unfair advantage for California schools that could now give young athletes the chance to make money off their talent and image while still in college. 

The NCAA knew they needed to do something quickly, so they rushed through a policy that opened up NIL to all college athletes in the country, and it has been expanding and evolving over the last four years. 

Grant Duff, who has coached at the University of Utah, Weber State University, and is now the defensive coordinator for Idaho State University, says, “The best part of NIL is that athletes have an opportunity to make good money. The downside comes with the free-for-all that money causes.”

Dybantsa confers with BYU Head coach, Kevin Young.

One of the biggest current examples of what a school can do when the boosters are willing to pay for success is Texas Tech University. From 2020-2024, Texas Tech had 34 wins, which works out to 6.8 wins per year with a low of 4 wins and high of 8. Then Texas Tech’s boosters got involved, led by Cody Campbell, an oil industry businessman and Chairman of the Texas Tech board. The football program was given 28 million dollars for NIL with a simple message attached to the large pile of money: Win. And win now. And win they did. 

By signing NIL deals with athletes in the transfer portal, Texas Tech went from a middle-of-the-pack school in their conference to one of the top 12 teams in the country. They didn’t just win games in 2025, they made many of their opponents look like they didn’t belong on the same field, including the University of Utah and BYU twice. That is what money can buy.