Thursday marked 500 days since Governor Cox took office.
“A couple of weeks after I took the oath of office, we released the one Utah roadmap, a set of principles and goals that have guided our administration. And I'm pleased to report that we've hit nearly all of the milestones that we set,” Cox said.
Despite economic growth and record low unemployment according to Cox, concerns over inflation continue to weigh heavily on Cox and his office.
“What we don't want to do is exacerbate it and make things worse,” he said.
His plans to address growing inflation focus on making transportation more affordable through mass transit programs and providing resources for those most in need by building up food pantries.
As more and more families rely on food pantries to cope with high food prices due to growing inflation, Cox also must address the threat of food shortages due to the conflict in Ukraine and a poor wheat year in other markets. Cox sees these shortages, coupled with national shortages of baby food, as a failure of several government agencies.
“It's a colossal failure of our federal government's trade barriers and tariffs, policies that had been misguided for a long time and now it's rearing its head and in the worst of ways,” Cox said.
Cox’s office is also working to control is Utah’s ongoing drought.
“Right now, the short-term answers are all about conservation. As I've said before, we know we can do this. We know we can do it because we did it last year. People are already cutting back on their lawns, farmers are cutting back significantly on irrigation when it comes to their crops. That's going to help us get through what could potentially be a very dry summer,” Cox said.
Through individual conservation efforts paired with the state’s efforts to fund the integration of water-saving technologies into farming irrigation systems, Cox says Utahns have the tools to cope with drought conditions.
