(rousing music) - [Announcer] PBS Utah presents the "Governor's Monthly News Conference," an exchange between Utah reporters and Governor Spencer Cox.

(rousing music) - Good morning, everyone.

Welcome.

It's great to see all of you again.

I hope you've had a great summer.

I know we have kids going back to school, and passed a bunch of college kids apparently going back to school here at the University of Utah.

We wish everybody the best as they embark on a new school year.

Before we get to questions, I wanted to take just a few minutes and talk a little bit about where Utah is right now.

A few weeks ago, as you all reported, US News and World Report named Utah the best state in the country for the fourth year in a row.

That's remarkable.

It's something that's never happened before for a state to have four first-place finishes in a row.

Utah, there are lots of different indicators that they look at.

Of course, the economy, education, infrastructure, public safety, fiscal stability, healthcare, opportunity, environment, and others.

Utah is number two in the country in those rankings for economy, number two for fiscal stability, number four for infrastructure, near the top for education, top 10 for lots of other, in other categories as well.

And we're, obviously, very proud of that.

And Utah should be very proud of that.

But I also want to make it clear that it doesn't mean we get to take a victory lap or stop working.

There's still lots of issues out there and I hear those issues every day.

I've had Utahans stop me and say, you know, "That's great, but if my kids can't afford a home, what good is that to them?"

Farmers who are struggling through a terrible drought.

People who've stopped me to talk about the wildfires and the floods in their counties.

People who are worried about the Great Salt Lake.

People who are worried about technology and the changes that are happening in our society so rapidly that they feel a little unnerved and unrooted, overwhelmed, worried about their jobs or their kids and what new technologies, frontier technologies, the bad things that could happen to them and to our society.

These are certainly things that keep Utahans up at night and they keep me up at night too.

It's been an extraordinarily difficult year when it comes to to fire and drought.

We came out of the warmest, one of the warmest winters on record.

The record low snow pack forcing us to declare a statewide drought, or statewide emergency for drought.

This wildfire season has been one of the worst in our state's history.

I think we're about 560,000 acres now is where we are.

We've had three wildfires.

Well, I guess only two made it over 100,000 acres, but one was at like 97, 98,000 acres, so really three.

And, you know, that's three of the top six wildfires in our state's history all in one year.

And I've talked with those families who have lost homes, who have lost things that just can't be replaced, and it's heartbreaking.

And yet I've seen the incredible work, of course, of firefighters, two of which lost their lives in trying to protect our communities.

I've seen communities step up and help each other to rebuild and clean out and take care of each other.

And you know, I've seen our state and the forest service are working closer together than we ever had before.

We've got 18 million dollars already going towards the the Cottonwood Fire restoration.

Working with those communities, that's something that's never happened so quickly.

I mentioned the Great Salt Lake.

We have enormous needs with the Great Salt Lake as well, and yet real changes is happening there.

We have Compass Minerals has permanently dedicated over 200,000 acre feet of water each year to the lake.

We were able to purchase 144,000 acre feet of water, acquire that through the acquisition of the assets of US Magnesium, through that purchase, 144,000 acre feet of water.

We've created new opportunities for agriculture to participate in saving the lake, which is going to make a huge difference.

And statewide leaders who are engaged in this in ways they've never been before.

I mentioned housing continues to be a challenge, but we continue to be dedicated to making the changes necessary to help our young people be able to afford to live here.

We're focused on starter homes, the infrastructure, land use reform, everything that we need to make it easier to build in our state.

And finally, on AI, we want Utah students and workers to be prepared to use these tools in ways that help them, that augment their work, that make sure that there are humans in the loop and that humans benefit from this, that the computers make life better for us and it's not us serving the computers.

And we're working through what that physical infrastructure means behind AI, what that should look like, and how that should work in our state.

America has to build again.

That's who we are, and that's what Utah does best.

And we will continue to do that, but we can do that in smart ways, in ways that, again, benefit neighborhoods, benefit communities, benefit our environment, and make life better for the people who live here.

That's the Utah way, and I believe in us.

I believe, again, that if any state can figure out how to navigate the difficult times that we're in, it's Utah.

Because we come together, we work together, and that hasn't changed.

There isn't a state in America that doesn't have challenges right now, the same challenges that we're facing, but I know, and I have confidence in Utah, that we can overcome those challenges as we work together.

We build together.

We solve problems together.

We overcome the hard times together.

We take care of our neighbors together.

And when we face these challenges, we'll find the solutions.

So with that, I'm happy to take any questions you might have.

- Regarding droughts and water supply, continuing with that topic, are you concerned about how quickly Utah's reservoirs have dropped to about 50%?

And does there need to be additional restrictions or beyond just asking people to conserve?

- So, no, I'm not concerned about how quick, I mean, of course, I'm concerned about the drought and where we are, but this is why we have reservoirs.

I mean they've been lower before, and the water restrictions that have been put in place.

I mean, there are water restrictions everywhere in Utah, and they're exactly what we need for the conditions that we're seeing right now.

Of course, we've had some tremendous monsoonal moisture over the past month.

We have more of that in the forecast, which we're grateful for.

I can tell you, I do not have a lawn at my house in Sanpete County.

It is gone.

It's because of restrictions that we've been under.

We didn't farm more than half our farm this year for the first time.

I mean, my dad's 75.

He can't remember it ever happening.

And that's true for many in the ag community.

But those were necessary restrictions based on the water storage that we have.

So if you had told me that we were going to have the snow pack that we had last year and that we would have reservoirs at 50%, that's a win.

And that's about where we were hoping we would be as we get towards the end of the growing season.

So obviously, we need a better winter.

We're hopeful with some of the advanced forecasts that we're seeing, but we don't know.

And we'll do whatever it takes next year.

If we have another bad year, that means even more restrictions next year.

But I feel really good about where we are.

- Lake Powell just hit a record low.

Would you support further releases from Flaming Gorge to prop it up?

Or is it time to let Lake Powell go?

- Well, it's definitely not time to let Lake Powell go.

That's never going to happen.

I don't know why we keep writing about it.

It's not going to happen or talking about it.

What I will say is we have a framework with the Department of Interior.

You all have seen it.

You all have reported on it.

We need to keep Lake Powell from hitting deadpool.

That's important.

There are really hard sacrifices that every state has to make as we move forward with preserving the Colorado.

There are investments that need to be made downstream of Flaming Gorge.

We wanna make sure that any releases that come from Flaming Gorge count as our contribution, and that those are recovered in better years.

And we've been able to do that in the past.

I mean, again, three or four years ago, when we were at record lows, we had major releases from Flaming Gorge and we were able to to recover some of those in the wet years.

We'll continue to do that, but yeah, we have to make the system work, and it is a system.

And we recognize that, that we're part of that system.

But I think we're, you know, nobody's happy with the plan that the Department of Interior has come up with.

But nobody's ever going to be happy with the way that this turns out.

And we think we're pretty close to finding the right balance there.

- [Ben] Do you want a state's deal or are you okay with this?

- Well, look, so the problem with what they've come up with is it's a very short term.

I mean, it's kind of a two-year, giving us a, yeah, yeah.

So I would much rather have a long-term deal that the states agree to and that we avoid litigation.

That's the goal.

What interesting is... I mean, in a way... I don't wanna say this is a good thing 'cause it's not a good thing, but we're always wondering whenever you come up with a deal, it's like, "What does the worst case scenario look like in this deal?"

And we're now negotiating the deal in the worst case scenario.

So we know what the worst case scenario looks like, and that's helpful because it's not about projections.

It's now about real wet water.

And we know what that means.

And so it's kind of given us some insight.

And so I'm still hopeful that with this framework, we can kind of use it as a baseline to start working on a longer term deal.

- What do you think of the Colorado River Abundance Act and kind of getting more direct water to the lake?

I mean, I know that Utah, obviously, has been asked to do these voluntary cuts, but as far as, you know, other solutions like this, what do you make of those?

- Yeah, yeah.

So look, we need other solutions.

And I've been pressing for a long time to kind of get out of this zero-sum mindset.

And again, there's only one river and there's only so much water and we're all trying to divide it up.

So it's the very definition of a zero-sum game, right?

But how do we create new water sources?

How do we get more abundance in this conversation?

And so I'm very supportive of that.

More storage in places.

Making sure that we're developing the new technologies that are out there.

So desalination, I think, has to play a major, major role.

Look, we want more water for California.

We want more water for Arizona.

The more water we get there, that helps upstream from us.

And so we'll continue to work with them.

And that's the one area, back to Ben's question, where there is unity of agreement and purpose and ideas that are coming forward.

It's one of the rare places where California and Utah agree completely, and we're working closely together.

- But it's gonna take a whole bunch of money.

- It will.

We know that, yeah.

And we're willing.

We've said this, like, Utah is willing to help fund desalination in California because we believe in that.

But it's a federal issue as well, and so it's going to take some federal solutions.

Kim, go ahead.

Sorry.

- Yeah, what is your reaction to the Department of Homeland Security's recent court filing that it no longer intends to convert the Salt Lake City warehouse into an ICE detention center?

- Yeah.

Well, we've had so many conversations with the Department of Homeland Security.

They've been very valuable partners.

I appreciate their relationship with the state.

And we've been working closely together.

I know I have to be careful because the litigation is still ongoing.

Even though they signed that agreement yesterday, the litigation has not been dismissed.

So I can't say a lot right now, except that I'm very grateful for the conversations that are happening and the decisions that are happening in that space.

- Are you aware of any attempt to find a new ICE warehouse in the state now?

I know that's something that you've supported in the past.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

There have been conversations.

I've said from the beginning that... Again, even under the Biden administration, they knew we needed a facility here, but it needed to be the right size and in the right place.

And so I know that those conversations are happening, but they haven't gone very far.

So there's no location or place that we're aware of right now.

- Just to double back briefly on fires, given how extreme this fire season has been, when you think long term about the state's needs for addressing a season like this, what kind of, if any, investments in resources, infrastructure, what do you think the state needs to be investing in to prevent these, you know, half a million acre burns?

- Yeah.

So there's two things that really matter here.

And we've been doing them.

We just need to do a lot more of them.

And we'll have an after-action gathering of people when the fire season ebbs, or starts to end as we get closer, you know, to the end of September/October timeframe.

And so the first is, and I'm really proud, this season, if we were operating the same way we were 10 years ago right now, we would've had 20 of these 100,000 acre fires.

And so what we've been able to do is we've been able to build locations throughout the state where we store resources, including air resources, so we can attack the fires more quickly.

And that's prevented.

I wish you guys could see what I see every day about the number of starts that we have that end at 10 acres or five acres or less than 100 acres.

It's incredibly intense, and our ability to attack quickly is what prevented this from being even worse than it was.

And I would like to see more of that if we can, if we could buy a couple more helicopters and get them in other places so we can get there quickly.

The bigger one is the way we treat our forests.

And this started with the Biden administration.

And it's been accelerated with the Trump administration.

And that is understanding that we've made a huge mistake in the way that we treat our forests.

This idea that you don't touch them, you just stay away from them, and then you put fires out when they start has been devastating to the forest.

There's a lot of science around this now.

When it comes to conifers, for example, you should probably have about 30 to 50 trees per acre.

We have places where we have 300 to 1,000 or more trees per acre.

And what that does is it creates these intense fires that are so powerful that the regrowth, the natural regrowth doesn't occur because it just devastates the soil.

And so we have to go in and do those treatments afterwards.

It also hurts with our water supply because it creates a canopy over the forest.

So when it snows, the snow doesn't get down to the ground.

It just sits on the treetops and then it evaporates.

So it never gets down into the soil.

Things don't grow underneath those trees anymore.

It hurts wildlife, water quality.

So there are a lot of different issues there.

So what we found is, and again, with both administrations, we can go in and mechanically treat them.

We do prescribe burns, although you have to be really careful with those.

There's only a few weeks in the spring and in the fall where you can do prescribed burns in the right places without them getting out of control.

But when you can do those treatments, you can significantly reduce the intensity and the size of these types of burns.

And we saw that on these fires.

You can go down and see where we treated lands and where we hadn't treated them.

And it's a completely different story.

And so we've really got to accelerate that and everybody knows it.

- Governor, your thought on the- - We're going to go up here, then I'll come down to you.

- Governor, the Medicaid budget overrun may reach $200 million.

To what degree do you think mismanagement, fraud, or waste is a factor in that?

- Zero.

Zero.

Zero.

There is none.

I mean, look, there's always fraud.

We lead the nation when it comes to fraud and mismanagement.

That was completely, and you know this, Brian.

We've told you this and you know this.

It had nothing to do with that.

Every state is struggling with the changes that were made at the federal level when it comes to understanding it, especially coming out of COVID, when it comes to the projections and what those are going to be.

And any insinuation that that overrun had to do with fraud, waste, and abuse is completely fabricated.

And you know this and we've told you this and everybody knows.

It was completely... And this has been a problem for a couple years and it is a problem.

It's been impossible to get the projections right because of the changing laws, because of what happened coming out of COVID, who qualifies, who doesn't qualify.

That's what we're working through and we'll continue to work through that.

Katie?

- Governor, what is your response to concerns surrounding Flock cameras and the Utah Civic Compacts message encouraging lawmakers to address out-of-state agencies making a large amount of requests to Utah Flock cameras with no systems to verify if those searches adhere to Utah law?

- Yeah, deeply troubled by and share those same concerns.

In fact, so we have, for those who don't know, Flock cameras are a tool that have been used by law enforcement all across the United States for years that could have some privacy concerns.

Do have some privacy concerns.

And there's been stories now coming from agencies across the United States where law enforcement individuals have accessed those cameras for personal reasons, for reasons outside of the law enforcement chain.

And I think Americans should be deeply concerned about that.

The state of Utah has been in the forefront of really trying to put guardrails around the use of those types of technologies to protect citizens' privacy.

They can only be used in the most extreme circumstances to protect life and safety.

And I don't think we should say, "Hey, just trust us."

I don't think that that should be the response at all.

And so I've asked, we have a Utah privacy board and a statewide board and a privacy commission.

And I've asked them to do a review of all of our rules and regulations around these cameras, especially how they're being used with local agencies to make sure that they are not being abused, to make sure that the public understands how and when they can be used, and if there are abuses taking place that people are held accountable.

We're not going to allow that here.

- Legislation to said guardrails?

- We have legislation that puts those guardrails in place.

The question is the legislation being followed?

And so that's what I've asked the privacy commission to do, to do a review of all of that.

But I would also say, if there are some gaps, then yes, I would absolutely support legislation.

But I think the legislation we have in place should allow us to protect people's privacy and make sure they're not being abused.

- How many hits were coming from, like, Houston and other places?

I mean, millions of hits over just a few years to 10 cameras in Weber County is what Utah Civic Compact found.

- And that's what I'm trying to understand.

That's why I've asked for that review.

So please.

- Utah has made some significant ground in terms of nuclear energy development.

I'm curious, and we've had some backlash in the past couple, and just this past week, with the FTC filing.

What does it look like for Utah to be on the forefront of increased energy production?

How do you balance all of those concerns?

- Yeah, no, look, I mean, that... Publicity stunt notwithstanding, that's all it was.

And I just have to say, I'm really troubled that the people who tell us to follow the science appear to only want us to follow the science that fits their narrative.

But this has been overwhelmingly positive.

And it should be.

In fact, I mean, the very groups who were upset about that FTC filing also admitted that nuclear power is really good for the environment and that we need more of it.

And so I think it's really great that Utah is at the forefront of this.

And that's been our approach to and any of the above energy solutions.

We're also leading the nation in geothermal production and new scientific research there, new innovation.

And Utahans should be really, really proud of that.

Solar has truly expanded in a big way in Utah.

In fact, I think I saw that solar production in May was the highest that it's ever been in our state's history and surpassed many other sources of energy development.

And energy is so critical.

I mean, one of the problems we have right now that people are struggling with is the cost of electricity.

The gas prices, of course, with what's happening with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz and everything else, that we need more energy.

And we want it to be done in a way that is safe and clean.

And these new innovations, new nuclear has the opportunity to do that using less water or no water, which is fantastic.

I mean, this is really kind of the dream come true.

And so I'm proud that that Utah is leading.

We just had an undersecretary of the Department of Energy who was here in town, and the message was, like, Utah is getting noticed because you're leading the way and we need the rest of the country to follow what you're doing.

So I think we're doing it the right way.

We're not cutting any corners on safety.

We're working with the federal nuclear regulatory agencies.

Our agencies are engaged.

We're going to make sure that we follow the letter of the law.

We're going to do everything to protect the health and safety of Utahans and make sure that we have clean, abundant energy.

- Governor, going back to water for a second.

We heard a lot about data centers yesterday at the Capitol.

Water use has been at the forefront of at least the public discourse on these facilities.

HB 76 did put some guardrails, some regulatory requirements for large scale data centers, but it only pertained to facilities that had an annual withdrawal of 75 acre feet or higher.

As the technology progresses and these closed-loop systems that use a one-time use of water and very little after that become more prevalent, should we look into water reporting requirements for these huge facilities that are using closed-loop systems?

If it's a one-time thing, how are we actually knowing how much water they're really using?

And would you support updating HB 76 to include closed-loop systems in that legislation?

- Yeah, look, all of the data centers in recent years that have looked to come to Utah have been closed-loop systems.

If I felt I could do it with executive authority, I would've done it already, but I would support legislation that requires only closed-loop systems.

I mean, that's the best technology available.

Again, they use very little water.

You put the water in, it stays there, and that's it.

We were the first state in the nation to pass the water reporting requirements for data centers, which I supported and signed.

And so yeah, I have no problem whatsoever supporting additional disclosures.

We wanna make sure everybody knows what these data centers are using.

And because of the changing technology, and this is really exciting.

So much of the information out there about water use in data centers is just wrong.

I mean, it was true 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

It's just not true today.

And so we can require those new technologies, and I would definitely support that.

- Sorry.

That's all the time we have for the television broadcast.

Thank you for joining us for the "Governor's Monthly News Conference."

- [Announcer] This has been the "Governor's Monthly News Conference."

For video and more information, visit pbsutah.org/governor.

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