Kerry Bringhurst: Holly Richardson with Utah Policy has been joining us throughout the Utah legislative session, which began in January, concluded last Friday. We have one final conversation today to kind of wrap things up from what took place. Curious to know how many bills actually passed and were introduced in this legislative session?
Holly Richardson: So, 959 were introduced, and 582 were passed. It was a record number of bills introduced and almost a record number of bills passed this year. There's been a really sharp uptick in the number of bills being introduced and passed just in the last few years. They don't know how to limit people's bills without having a conversation saying, 'Well, you're restricting my ability to run what my constituents want me to run.' Utah runs single issue bills, and so you may have a bill that really is changing a couple of lines — a clean up bill, for example, but that requires its own bill — so there's some of that as well.
Kerry Bringhurst: Any discussion of ways to maybe change that, improve the system?
Holly Richardson: There is ongoing discussion, but nobody has come to a solution yet. So the last few years, you've seen a lot of both legislative leadership and the governor saying, 'This is too many bills we need to, you know, hear it back,' and it just does not happen.
Kerry Bringhurst: Okay. We're daily just watching announcements from the governor's office of which of these bills will be signed into law. One of those bills and some associated with the domestic violence funding to be cut or eliminated. What is the latest on that?
Holly Richardson: Unfortunately, during this legislative session, the Utah Legislature did not choose to prioritize funding for domestic violence. What happened this year is there were a couple of bills that were supported by the subcommittees and then just not funded by the executive committee. So one of them is ongoing funding for domestic violence providers, so that would be shelters and other services that these providers help victims of domestic violence. One of them was a request for $260,000 for strangulation exams — and strangulation is one of a key indicator in high lethality for domestic violence — and so they wanted to add this $260,000, but it was not funded at all.
Kerry Bringhurst: And that's a change. Any reasons given as to why this particular cut in funding?
Holly Richardson: It is a change. It's a disappointment, for sure, for the domestic violence service providers, and no explanation was given.
Kerry Bringhurst: Other topics that were big this past legislative session, related to energy and considering different sources of energy, how to get energy into the state of Utah?
Holly Richardson: I think one of the big interesting bills in Utah is really the beginning of promoting nuclear energy. So the technology has advanced a lot, but the permitting process, which is a federal thing, has really been onerous, and so Utah passed a framework that really promotes the use of nuclear, especially what they call portable they're using these portable units. What they're doing is saying, 'Look to meet the needs of the future, including AI, we need to be able to have bigger energy sources.' And in fact, Eagle Mountain, as a city, is discussing putting nuclear energy out in their city so that they can provide what they need to be able to bring in these big data centers.
So Utah is really promoting that they're looking at coal fired power plants and wanting to keep those online. And I think that lines up with what the federal government is talking about. The EPA is going to remove quite a few of the regulations that have been put in place for air quality and water quality. And you know, of course, there's some concerns that come with that, but there's also the possibility for states to really lean into their own energy production.
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