♪♪♪ male announcer: Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund.

Jason Perry: Tonight on "The Hinckley Report" as the legislature counts down the final hours of the session lawmakers race against the clock to pass priority bills; elected officials wrestle with how much power the governor should wield during an emergency; and details emerge on how the legislature plans to spend a historic budget surplus.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Jason: Good evening and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week, we have Max Roth, anchor with Fox 30 News; Sonja Hutson, political reporter with KUER; and Robert Gerhke, news columnist with the Salt Lake Tribune.

So glad to be with you all this evening and this is a very interesting time.

It's the last few hours of the legislative session; 45 days, it barely even seems like it, right?

But so many bills on the table.

I want to get to some of those because some are on their way to the governor already, some are gonna be really decided this evening here in the final hours.

I want to get to one issue, Sonja, we'll start with you, which is-- it's been a theme through the entire legislative session.

It's how do we separate the responsibilities during a pandemic.

This is something the legislature, the governor, even local health authorities have been really wrestling over.

Sonja Hutson: Yeah, I mean, the legislature has been talking about this since last spring, right?

And so, they took a lot of time to kinda craft some legislation that they felt was an appropriate balance between the legislature, the governor's office, and local health departments.

So the big bill passed the house last night.

It was the very last thing they did before they went home for the night and it gives the legislature a lot more power in public health emergencies like the one we're in right now.

So they can basically override any public health order which is a big shift in power.

That's kinda the main thing and this is something that they've been working on with the governor's office.

So I assume that he will probably sign it.

And it's just kind of trying to balance those powers little more.

The legislature felt really out of the loop at the beginning of this-- of this pandemic.

They felt like they were learning about executive orders through the news, which really kinda ticked them off.

And so, they passed some stuff in a special session that just kinda gave them more notice and a little bit more by it but this is a big expansion of their emergency powers.

Jason: Robert, what is the heart of the problem?

The notice thing is true, but what really is the problem with the governor extending these emergency orders?

Robert Gerhke: I mean, I think the argument that the legislature made and I think it has some merit is that state of emergency isn't really intended to last an entire year.

I mean, you know, that's for earthquakes, it's for fires, it's for things like that.

And so, we have this pandemic that took an entire year now and it's gonna take several more months.

And we've been operating under this government-- governor issued state of emergency and the legislature has had problems with that.

A lot of legislators think it went too far.

They don't like mask mandates but they want to have control more than anything.

And so, I understand where they're coming from and wanting to reestablish some balance.

It should be noted I think that throughout this entire thing ever since day one the legislature has had that authority that it gave to itself through that constitutional amendment to call itself into an emergency session.

If it really had the guts to do it.

But, you know, maybe to their credit they didn't tinker with it.

They didn't want to get too involved with it, you know, there's-- it's finding that balance like you said at the outset to between being able to move expeditiously and urgently when it's needed and also being able to have the authority or the body that is supposed to have the authority, the legislature, setting the policy.

And so, hopefully they struck a balance.

I think the governor is indicating that he's, you know, that they've got it to a place where he's comfortable with.

Jason: Go ahead, Max.

Max Roth: I think Robert is exactly right there, Jason.

You know, the--it's the difference between the nature of an executive and a lawmaker policymaker that's, you know, even when we elect these folks or when we're electing governor, we're thinking okay, this is the man or woman who's going to be making the decisions on how we act, how the government acts.

Whereas we're electing representatives to hopefully they reflect what we think is wise in opinion to set policy, and it's just the-- it's not a system designed for a pandemic.

It's just, you know, pandemic is a whole different kind of emergency, that extended emergency.

So they gotta find that middle ground.

Robert: And I think Senator Vickers said it during debate presentation that this is not about this pandemic.

It's about-- it's about the next emergency whatever that may be and hopefully we have 100 years before the next one hopefully.

It's not really going to affect them as much this time.

It's more prospectively.

Sonja: It might, I mean, when I look at places like Texas, where they're lifting a bunch of their restrictions, we're getting to a point where the government is going to have to make some decisions about like okay, at what point do we start lifting restrictions with vaccines rolling out, cases are falling, they're gonna continue to fall it seems like.

And so, I think this could still be in play during this pandemic.

Robert: They had a couple opportunities to do that this session and didn't do it.

They didn't have the votes to do it.

So that, I mean, they tried to repeal a mask mandate.

Representative Phil Lyman twice tried to repeal the mask mandate immediately and they couldn't do it.

They did have this bill that Representative Paul Ray proposed to set these milestones or mile markers at which point will start rolling back some of the restrictions and that one looks like it's getting to a place that they've negotiated it with the governor's office to a point where they're gonna be able to pass that one through and get a signature on it.

Jason: Hey, Max, will you talk about that one for just a moment because it's interesting.

This is Representative Paul Ray and he called it the endgame bill.

He was saying how do we know when we're done with the pandemic?

How do we know and we can get back to business?

They're tryin' to set those parameters.

Talk about that for just a moment because this one had a whole lot of negotiation and a little bit of controversy.

Max: Yeah, you know, the controversy comes just in that Paul Ray representing stream of thought that's-- that is really prevalent.

That this is overblown at this point.

That the government needs to pull back.

That these mandates are too restrictive on people's individual rights to decide how they behave.

And so, Ray wants-- there's a there's a sense of resentment about the health department making decisions that feel, in their minds, arbitrary.

Now the health department would say their decisions based on science rather than on arbitrary benchmarks.

So yeah.

Robert: Oh yeah, I mean, it's-- Representative Paul wrote back in May of last year said that we should roll back and we should get rid of all the restrictions and if you'll think about it since then we've had probably 300,000 people infected and 1800 dead.

So, you know, to have legislators start calling the shots on these things is a dangerous way to do it frankly, but you know, he said these benchmarks: half the population vaccinated.

We're not close to that yet.

So we have a long ways to go.

I mean, we're getting there, but there's a ways to go and hopefully if we stay on a trajectory we're on it's, you know, we'll get to where we need to be.

I mean, he said he told me last week that he thinks will have a Jazz game fully, you know, full attendance 10-12,000 people in attendance and within the week and unfortunately, the Jazz don't play again till March 12.

So we got some time, but that's the kind of mentality I think that we're seeing from the legislature.

They want to be in control but they're not necessarily basing this on science and data.

And they don't have the expertise to do that.

So, it's a tension that has existed since the early days of the pandemic.

Jason: Sonja, I wanna ask you before we leave this because it is an interesting point what you all brought up on the distinction about who's supposed to make these decisions.

The three areas that this bill specifically said is the end game for him is an average of 447 new cases per day.

We're about 640 right now.

Covid patients less than 15% of the ICU beds and 1.6 billion Utah's been vaccinated as Robert just said.

But what's interesting about this is these-- the legislature's kinda, saying, we want to help set this policy and set up a little bit of an issue with these local health departments, who are the ones that kinda monitor these things, but also have to implement that policy.

Sonja: Yeah, I mean, everything about emergency powers as a tug of war between local health departments between the state health department, between the legislature, and the governor's office.

And what's interesting about those thresholds is that that case number is like when we were almost to the peak of our summer surge.

Like that's not where we were for the months actually at the beginning of the pandemic.

And so, I'm a little interested in why that is the case threshold, but, yeah, I mean, the argument for, you know, let the public health officials make this decision, but the legislature says, you know, maybe you're being a little too extreme.

Robert: Kind of illustrates the problem because when Representative Ray presented this bill in committee he said it was 2,900 cases a day is the average that would trigger that threshold.

It's 2,900 cases in a 14 day span.

So and then they raised it so it ends up being about 450-470 like you said.

So, it's the problem when it's the challenge of having people who don't know what they're doing trying to set pandemic policy.

Sonja: And Senate President Stuart Adams had a really interesting comment about that earlier this week.

He was kind of saying well I don't really know if this bill is necessary.

We didn't legislate the start of this pandemic.

Why do we need to legislate at the end of it?

So we'll see what happens to that in the senate.

Jason: Fore sure.

So there's a line from this to a couple other interesting bills touching public education, higher education this week as well as they talk about the Covid response.

So, Max, one of those bills, this is Senator Todd Wyler, we talked about on the program last week about their legislators interested in getting all kids back to school in the original draft of those bills went right after making sure every district allowed K through 12, but in addition this week an amendment was added to this particular bill that told universities-- public universities they must go back 75%.

Offer classes for 75% of their students.

Max: Yeah, you know, its again, it's a very similar thing to what we were just talking about and you mentioned the link there is how much control do you give elected school boards?

How much control do you give the board of trustees of a university and a university president?

And those sorts of institutions.

There are people who have been elected to make those decisions.

And the legislature every now and then likes to establish their preeminence among the different governing bodies that they're the main governing body in the state of Utah, whether it's over counties and cities or whether it's over school boards.

And we've seen a heavy hand that way this year.

It started with the whole issue of giving teachers bonuses and kind of trying to muscle the Salt Lake City School District into going back to class.

And some would say that worked.

That Salt Lake kind of toed the line after that threat was made.

And now they're just-- it just feels like an extension of that.

Sonja: Well, that's always a huge debate at the legislature and what a lot of people criticize lawmakers for as they say we're for local control, but then they'll go and pick and choose areas where, you know, they want to make decisions for localities instead, and if you talk to lawmakers about that particularly I'm thinking with the teacher bonuses that Max just mentioned.

They say, well, this is something that's so important we need to step in and we need to be, you know, good stewards of the children of our state.

And this is something that's so important that maybe we do know better.

Robert: We can spend an entire show I think talking about the areas where the legislature's come in and taken power away from school boards, from local health districts, from cities, from counties.

It's what they do when they come into it come into a session.

They took-- they're taking power away from police departments in some ways by saying you have to do this, you have to do that.

And then it also takes power away from cities and mayors.

So I mean, the legislature loves to control and call the shots and that's what we see for 45 days every year.

Jason: One of the things they did get involved in directly just this week and all of you have covered it to some degree is efforts to help with the homeless-- people who are experiencing homelessness in the state of Utah.

So Robert just this week a big press conference in fact outside the Capitol.

Clark Ivory, Abigail Miller, you have the president of the Senate, the Speaker of the House talking about records amounts of money to help address this issue.

Robert: Yeah, I mean, and I think they are seeing that this is not-- we thought we had the problem under control I think a year ago, two years ago, and it's not.

And so, they're trying to nip this in a bud or at least put a big investment into it and it's important because they haven't really put the money where it needs to go and that is getting people into permanent housing.

You solve homelessness by putting people in homes.

And so that's I think the most important piece of this it's gonna go a long ways toward resolving this problem.

I don't know, Sonja, were you at that news conference?

Sonja: No, my coworker was but I mean, if they're putting a lot of money into it but these private organizations are putting even more.

Jason: Right, about 50 million for the legislature, 730 million from private enterprise.

Go ahead, Max.

Max: And the extent of this problem is-- cannot be overstated really and this problem specifically in Utah.

Utah has fewer vacancies in homes than any state in the country, 50th out of 50.

We do not have homes available and, and this is what stunned me the most, the median home price in Utah about $589,000.

That's the fourth highest in the country.

It goes, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Utah.

And that stuns me because Utah's median wage is nowhere near fourth highest in the country.

And so it's something I'm glad they're taking seriously and they seem to think that this is-- that what they're putting in place will be effective.

They sure think that they can leverage a whole lot of money 50 million dollar investment from the state and then eventually getting that to 750 from philanthropies, local governments, and some capital investment.

Sonja: Well, it's interesting to talk about the median wage because that is a portion of this calculation that lawmakers don't really talk about a lot.

They are very focused on addressing the supply side of the issue: building more units.

You know, we don't have enough units.

There's been lots of reports on that.

We do need to build more.

But they want to focus on that supply side versus raising the minimum wage for example, which they think with you don't mess with the market.

Robert: Two bills, two bills this session that would raise the minimum wage and neither of them got very far at all.

Max: You know a lot of those things that the state brags about, you know, we're we're number one for business and Forbes magazine or those sorts of things or from the American Legislative Exchange Council, having a low minimum wage is one of the figures that gets Utah those rankings.

And so, when they say business friendly sometimes that does mean low wages.

So, the other thing to note that I think in another state where politics was more competitive and more combative is that they focus on building.

The President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House are both homebuilders for their day jobs.

Sonja: There's a lot of lawmakers that work in construction or real estate.

It's a pretty common crossover field.

Jason: Of note before we leave this, Representative Steve Eliason does have a bill to create an office of homeless services inside the department workforce services aimed at helping with this issue, but also one last thing will impact people in Salt Lake City in particular.

This Representative Ray Ward, a bill that allows people to build accessory dwellings.

Follow that one, Robert, but people creating these mother in law apartments or something like that in their home for people to live in.

Robert: And the concern or I guess the reason he thinks it needs to be done is because some localities and municipalities who said no, we don't want these allowed.

You know, creates parking issues.

It creates density issues.

And so they put restrictions on it and it says well now we have a crisis.

We need more housing and so one way to do that is to limit cities abilities to restrict those.

You know, and so, you can see potential problems, but it's also something as Max said, we don't have the inventory now.

We don't have places for people to live.

And I think that's an important priority for us.

Sonja: And any-- are an interesting strategy, because I kinda think of them as a nimby friendly way to increase density you know, you're just making a little mother in law unit, rather than building a big apartment complex in some of these single family home neighborhoods, but the flip side of it is also there's the potential for these to be turned into Air BnB's and that doesn't do anything to help the housing stock.

Jason: All right, let me get to a couple of other issues that just kinda discreet single issues that I just think are interesting for the session.

One occupied so much time, we talked about it on the show, Dixie State University, all right.

So a bill has finally been compromised.

They've had a compromise on this bill.

Max, talk about what you've seen behind the scenes because this one divided our legislature.

Max: It divided our legislature, it divided the southwestern Utah community between a lot of the young people, the students at the University, and the folks who have lived there for a long time.

Yeah, there is-- I didn't realize I've been a northern Utah in my whole life.

Exactly how much attachment people had to that notion of that being Utah's Dixie.

And it is, you know, the students say hey, we're going out into a big world, where we're gonna be on Linked In looking for jobs across the country and outside of southwestern Utah, Dixie means something wholly different.

And the power of that word and that name has changed over time.

Both sides think it's a powerful name.

It's just which powers imbued in it.

Is it the negative connotations from America's history or is that what a lot of folks down there say is really positive connotations of their viner heritage.

Sonja: Yeah, I don't think you can necessarily separate the meaning of that meaning, you know, that the American south versus the south of Utah.

I mean, back in the day, there was lots of Confederate iconography associated with the University.

Like they're not completely divorced.

But it was definitely that bill and the compromises that were made were a really big example of the Senate and the House working together this year.

And it was definitely something they could've fought over but it seems like they came to some sort of compromise where now that it's gonna go back to the board of trustees and they're going to have this conversation all over again.

Which they've already had but just to try to get some more public input.

Make people feel a little bit better that they are included in this conversation.

Robert: But I mean, it's kinda like-- Max: My understanding of the compromise was just a commission, right, to-- there'll be a committee that looks at preserving the culture and the history, but it's not--that can be-- it doesn't sound like that committee is going to have any authority over the name change really.

Robert: Yeah, I mean, you guys are both right.

I think regardless how people down there view it, it's viewed differently outside the state, outside the region.

And so you've kind of got to do something.

You can't separate the racist overtones from the term, but I think they kind of punted on this frankly.

I mean, they're just like well we'll fight about this later because we don't, you know, we don't want to have to fight now.

It's encouraging that they're getting more public input, but ultimately at the end of the day, I mean, I think that names gotta change and there seemed to be strong momentum to do that but they didn't want to steamroll the locals.

Jason: Yeah, in fact, I think it's compromise that something affected as you come up with your new name it could have the word Dixie in it and they didn't even want to prescribe.

Sonja: It leaves a lot open.

Jason: Yeah, speaking of something leave it open, new state flag.

Okay, Sonja, so this bill is back.

Sonja: Finally got it through.

Jason: Finally did, talk about this because there's gonna be another group to help decide on this.

Sonja: Lots of commissions created this session.

So what this bill does is and this is something that Senator Dan McCay has been tryin' to do for a long time.

He hates the state flag and so basically what it does is it creates this commemorative flag just for this year, which has already been designed and then it creates a commission to talk about potentially modifying or creating a new state flag.

The argument being that, you know, ours is just the state seal slapped on some blue fabric.

We want to modernize it, you know, make it more distinctive from other states that also just have their seal slapped on a piece of fabric.

So we'll see what that question comes up with and I believe it has to go back to the legislature to be approved.

Jason: That's right.

Max, what are you hearing about this?

Because it took a lot of time and a few years.

Max: Yeah, there was that weird little controversy at the end and it was it seemed a little overblown, where one of the designs was adopted by an online group that uses a hashtag that does that group and they say some pretty, you know, unsavory things in defending their point of view.

And so, so they were talking about leading a design out of the competition, but now you know, I feel attached a little bit to the old flag.

We always have it on our flagpole growing up.

So I'm a little sad that people bag on it so much but at the same time, you know, people love symbolism.

And so, he was absolutely right it is-- it's not too distinctive.

You see it from a distance and you don't know what you're lookin' at.

Robert: I think Max nailed it that people love symbolism.

We're fighting over the name of Dixie.

We're fighting over the flag.

We like-- we really like our symbols.

We really-- we get where we feel passionate about things that there's a connection to.

I mean daylight savings time.

There's never a bigger fight at the legislature than daylight saving time, which seems pretty trivial in the larger scheme of things when we're talking about three quarters of a million dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars for homeless people, but you know that these are the things that rile people up.

And it's interesting to watch it play out.

Sonja: Also very interesting to watch Senator McCay's passion for it.

He came in earlier this week to the house holding the flag and just to make a show of support for that bill.

Jason: Here's a flag on everyone's desk for them in the legislature.

I wanna hit a couple of more items, just really quickly.

Robert, you had a great calm on tax reform.

The legislature promised some of that.

We've got three specific areas of targeted tax decreases.

Robert: Yeah, yeah, so we're coming into the session have this big budget surplus.

The speaker, the governor, senate president, all said, we're gonna have some tax cuts.

They came up with about $100 million.

Part of that is just fixing error, I guess, and the Trump tax cut when they lowered the federal deduction.

It meant especially people with large families ended up paying more.

So they're fixing that.

It's not super controversial I don't think.

The other two they've come up with not taxing retirement income for seniors and not taxing military pensions, which I mean could we-- who can argue with that?

I mean, the problem is when you kinda unpack these a little bit is is most of that goes to people, who make more than $90,000 about 70% of the social security tax cut goes to people making over $91,000 at 90%, 90% plus of their military pension tax cut goes to people making more than $90,000.

And the part that bothered me about this is there was a proposal for an earned income tax credit, for lower income people, working families that would put about $640 into their pockets each year to help them pay those bills 'cause as we talked about, you know, we've got really high housing prices.

We've got pandemic struggles.

And they didn't pass that and it I think it was unfortunate they didn't say, you know, you've got these people who presumably have kids out of the house, who, you know, have lower expenses and these larger incomes almost doubled the statewide average, and they're going to get some tax relief, but, you know, it's well package proposal because everybody loves Grandma and everybody loves soldiers.

So it flew through.

Jason: For sure.

One more thing, Max.

When we talked on the show last week, we discussed how every year, we have an effort to go after Senate Bill 54, which allows people to get on the ballot by signature or through the caucus convention system.

What are you seeing happening this week 'cause that bill seems to have stalled a bit but you never know.

Max: Yeah, it seems like it has died the way that bills do.

You know that it's-- that it was sent to rules.

Bills, where, you know, that no one wants the sponsor to have their feelings hurt, but circled and not central rules, but circled and just kinda floating out there, but it is possible that it could pass the Senate still and if it were to pass it will be a dramatic change to the way that we select candidates.

It would essentially allow the Republican party to go to choose to go back to a system, where the convention entirely decides who is the candidate or who faces who or who gets on a primary ballot.

Jason: So what are y'all hearing?

Why is it--it reared up pretty quickly, got hot, and then stopped.

Sonja: Yeah, I'm not really sure what-- I mean, obviously it is such a hot potato controversial issue.

I think maybe the Senate just didn't want to deal with it this time around.

There's a lot goin' on.

There's still a pandemic goin' on.

And it also has the domino effect of Count My Vote, which is the people who originally came to the table and helped create SB 54.

They have said like look if this bill passes then we're either gonna put a referendum on it to repeal it or we're gonna go back to our original proposition, which is entirely eliminates the caucus convention system, which the Republicans would really not be happy about.

So I think there's also maybe a sense of not wanting to start from square one 'cause as you all know that was a very long years long fight that's still going on.

There was a lawsuit that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court before getting kicked back down but I think maybe there's a sense of not wanting to redo all of that.

Robert: And there was also some polling data that showed that people really like the primary system that they put in place.

And so, if they did try to pursue that initiative it probably would have, I mean, it has broad public support and I don't think they were ready for that fight.

Jason: One last thing, our last 15 seconds, Robert, where you're talkin' about that also did change when one needs to register and affiliated with a party, March 31st, we talked about this in the show.

So by March 31st now.

That bill has passed that's when you have to change your party affiliation if you're gonna vote in the next general election.

Robert: Yeah, and I think this was a response to Huntsman's campaign when he ran for governor to kinda say, you know, when when he was encouraging unaffiliated voters to move over.

There have been studies that show it didn't really make much difference, but they wanna limit that.

Limit the hi-jinks.

Jason: Limit the hi-jinks.

We're gonna have to end with that.

Thank you for your great insights about this legislative session.

So much to unpack, a lot of bills.

Thank you for giving us your insight.

And thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast on PBSUtah.Org/HinckleyReport or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

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