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

- Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome.

It's great to see you all again.

Yesterday I called the legislature into special session to extend our emergency flood declaration until August.

They also approved our plan to shift $20 million of transportation funds for snow removal, avalanche control, slide mitigation, and other emergency flood impacts.

Another $5 million from the general fund to address flood damage to state and local government infrastructure, and up to $5 million from the Department of Public Safety's Disaster Recovery Budget.

More funds will become available after the new fiscal year starts in July, if needed.

This will help ensure we have the resources in place to respond quickly to the flooding that we are seeing throughout the state.

We know that temperatures are rising and the next week or two will test some of our infrastructure.

In addition to flooding, we're concerned about mudslides and landslides.

In 2022, of course, soils were extremely dry and now soaked up from the runoff.

But we are seeing this these record snowpack levels soaking the ground, leaving little room for additional runoff, which is causing unstable soil conditions in many of our canyons and other places throughout Utah.

Utah Geological Survey have been very busy responding to numerous landslides.

We've had two in Summit County, one in Spanish Fort Canyon, one in Weber Canyon, and one in Morgan County, and are monitoring about 100 landslide-prone areas statewide.

Residents can visit floods.utah.gov for the latest information.

Also, just a couple other things before we open it up to questions.

Very pleased that, of course, the upside from our record snowpack is that our reservoirs and other large bodies of water, including the Great Salt Lake, are filling up rapidly.

The Great Salt Lake has come up 4 1/2 feet since hitting a record low in November, and we think it could come up another one to three feet this year, which is just amazing and really unprecedented.

Another big win though for the Great Salt Lake.

This week I announced Brian Steed will be joining our team as the new Great Salt Lake Commissioner.

Brian is currently serving as Executive Director of the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water and Air at Utah State University and Co-Chair of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team.

He formally was part of my cabinet as Executive Director of the Department of Natural Resources.

With Brian at the helm and an unbelievable water year, the Great Salt Lake will not only survive, but will thrive for decades to come.

Just one final note, I am very fond of bragging about our state.

I love to talk about us being the best state in the nation and that's what governors do, but it was really nice a couple weeks ago to have US News and World Report confirm that looking at several different categories and over 70 different metrics, adding them all together and ranking Utah number one in its annual, or semi-annual best states ranking.

Yesterday, the Milken Institute ranked Provo-Orem as the best-performing large city in America and Logan and St. George in the top three best small cities.

Again, things that all Utahans can be very proud of.

It's not just our strong economy and our quality of life that make Utah so special.

In fact, more importantly, it's the people and so I wanna thank all Utahans in our communities who are working together to innovate, bring people together and solve problems.

With that, I'm happy to take questions.

- Governor, on the special session yesterday, is that enough money to handle potential flooding or do you think lawmakers will just be right back there in another special session a month or two or three down the road?

- Yeah, I certainly hope that we won't have them back.

We've been looking very closely at what's happened, the monies that have been spent.

We know how much water is left in the mountains.

Again, most of the runoff in Southern Utah is past its peak so it's really Central Utah, Northern Utah that are at risk right now.

We've looked at the long-term forecast as best we can to see what we might be dealing with.

We know where those trouble spots are right now and so we feel pretty good about the funding that's available.

Again, we start a new fiscal year on July 1, so there will be more money available on July 1 that we can tap into without a special session if we need it.

And so there's a reason that we ask for that amount and that that was approved.

All of our emergency managers from across the state, we've taken input from them as well, so we feel pretty good about where we are.

Remember, we started with $5 million already, and so this is in addition to that and I'm hopeful that that will be sufficient.

- Governor, you mentioned Brian Steed's appointment, working with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, we looked at lakes in California on the other side of the Great Basin that have much simpler water pictures.

The folks, the Great Salt Lake has such a web of intersecting interests and so many people with water rights, so many water districts.

How much power is Brian Steed going to have to work with those folks?

How much leverage will he have to really save the lake?

- Yeah, Max, it's a really good question, and by the way, that's one of the questions that Brian asked me when I was trying to convince him to take this job and so the answer is that this position is really unprecedented.

We've never had a position like this.

And to make sure that this would not just be kind of a figurehead position, in developing the legislation, working with the Speaker and the President and members of the legislature, we actually gave this position a lot of authority not just to work with, but to really bring all of my cabinet members together, all of those different areas as well as the water managers across the state so that everyone is represented at the table and then he also reports directly to me, so I feel like I have a significant amount of authority and leverage and so I get to be the leverage for him in many of those discussions and he has my full support, as does he have the support.

This was very rare.

We did something unique in this legislation that I don't think we've done anywhere else and that is that the Speaker and the President were also involved in the selection process.

We usually don't do that.

Usually the governor appoints and the Senate confirms, right?

That's the way things are done.

But we felt this position was so important and we wanted the buy-in, not just of the executive branch, but of the legislative branch as well and so we wanted to make sure that they had a seat at the table.

That's why we all agreed to do something like that and so it was a unanimous decision, the Speaker and President as well.

So Brian gets to walk into a room now with the full backing of legislative leadership as well as the executive branch and that's a pretty big deal.

Great question.

- Governor, let's talk about gas.

We've seen an increase in the prices.

Is this something that concerns you?

Is there anything to do about it?

- Yeah, thank you, Angel.

It is something that concerns me.

I'm very worried about rising gas prices.

Sadly, there's not much that we can do about that in state government.

We have a limited amount of refining capacity in our state.

Those refineries are running at their full potential so they're producing as much gasoline as they can possibly produce right now and it is not enough for the entire state of Utah, which means that we need to bring gasoline in from other places and that adds to the expense of that.

One of the downsides of having the best economy in the nation is that sometimes things like gasoline are a little more expensive.

Now, I'm hopeful that over the course of the next several years, we can increase refining capacity in the state.

Those are certainly conversations that we've been having.

Building refineries is incredibly expensive and because of the current federal administration's position on oil and gas development and things like refineries, the market is very hesitant to put a lot of money into new refineries that might not be successful for 20 or 30 years and so getting those mixed signals from an administration that is not supportive of oil and gas development in our country makes it a little harder to get people to invest in major infrastructure processes like that, but those are conversations that I know have been had and will continue to have in the future.

- Governor, during the special session yesterday, it seemed like there was some concern or distrust from some lawmakers about emergency powers.

I wonder if you could describe your relationship between your office and the legislative branch and your thoughts on some of those efforts to maybe reign in the emergency declaration.

- Yeah, I don't think one or two lawmakers should be taken as any sort of sign of anything.

I think you'll notice that the, despite a couple amendments that failed miserably, the actual extension was passed unanimously.

That says more about one or two lawmakers than it does about any relationship that we have.

We have an incredible, in fact, I don't think we've ever had a better relationship with the legislature, writ large giving us the longer extension that was needed, I think speaks to the trust that the legislature does have with the executive branch.

We've been able to prove that.

There was one addition that we would have a 30-day reporting requirement, which I, they asked if that was okay, and I said, yes, in fact, we were planning on doing 15-day reporting requirements, so 30's fine with us.

It's really important that we communicate with each other and we've tried to do a better job of that certainly over the past couple years and I think, to a legislator, if you were to ask them about our relationship and our communication back and forth with them, because again, I just wanna point out, emergency powers are legislative powers that have been delegated to the executive branch.

That's really important to know.

It is me using their power and I appreciate that ability, but there's also a huge responsibility that comes anytime an executive is exercising legislative powers.

It should be very rare and it should only be used in true emergencies and this is a true emergency, as anybody that lives among our waterways would tell you.

- Good morning, Governor.

- Good morning.

- So lot of money yesterday, not a huge amount of money when we think about infrastructure money.

Is there any opportunity for the municipalities to tap into those resources?

Do you see a way that this is going to get down to the towns and cities directly or is it gonna happen all at the state level?

- No, Jeff, in fact, a lot of this will go directly to the cities and and towns and it's to help reimburse them for some of their efforts to keep their citizens safe.

That's what we've done with some of the $5 million we've already had.

Of course, we wanna get state resources to them as they need those, but they're expending their own resources in this and we wanna help them in that effort.

We won't be able to pay for everything, but certainly we can pay for some of that.

- [Jeff] Like what are cities and towns asking you for?

- Well, so obviously, originally we've been asked extensively for sandbags.

That was first and foremost and so that first $5 million, most of that went to sandbags and those have been distributed all across the state.

We will, I'm sure we'll have requests as for heavy equipment as they've had to move heavy equipment into deepen channels or, you know, remove obstructions.

There will be a possibility of having to tear out some culverts and bridges.

When the water gets too high, the best thing to do is actually remove the culverts so that it doesn't now flood into neighborhoods, right, so you can keep that channel open because there's a little bit of a bottleneck there and so I'm assuming we'll get some requests there as well over time.

- Thank you.

- Yep.

- Governor, in my goal to ask just questions about people named Brian, you also pointed Brian Redd as the Head of Corrections.

- Correct, yes.

It's been a a week of Brians.

- Yes, it has.

And you know, we've been looking at the new prison and at healthcare issues there at safety issues there and Brian Redd doesn't come from a corrections background and also some criticism about not conducting a national search.

Why not?

Why him?

- Well, there's a couple reasons.

One, Brian is one of the of the best and most competent public servants that I've ever engaged with.

Had an opportunity to work very closely with him.

This was not a quick decision.

This was not something that just happened overnight.

We worked very closely with Brian over the course of many years in his former capacity with the Department of Public Safety so Brian is no stranger to law enforcement.

He's no stranger to corrections.

He has been very successful in his role there.

He did leave to go into the private sector where he was employed at Goldman Sachs for a couple years and expressed a desire to come back to the state of Utah.

I can assure you that everyone who knows Brian at all, both in and out of corrections and has had any conversation with me has lotted the pick as a brilliant one.

Brian has exactly the educational background, the experience that we need in this position right now.

I've had people from inside of corrections who have reached out to us and just thanked us over and over again for picking someone like Brian as they've gotten to know him and been able to spend time with him and so I'm very optimistic, I'm very excited.

There were, Max, you mentioned that the healthcare piece of that and some of the struggles that we've had on the delivery side.

I don't know that it got a lot of attention, but we did through this legislative process, we are changing the way that those services are going to be delivered.

Instead of having corrections officials delivering healthcare within the system, we will have officials that will be overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which makes much more sense to me, anyway, that you would have healthcare professionals delivering healthcare instead of corrections professionals overseeing the healthcare and so Brian Redd is very familiar with the changes that we've made and very supportive of that model.

He met with legislative leadership yesterday.

My understanding is they had a great discussion.

He's been working to lay out his vision of corrections moving forward and again, I could not be more excited.

I assure you, doing a national search would not have returned anybody with the capacity and the qualifications of Brian Redd and he's somebody, again, that knows the system inside and out and lives here already.

- Governor, what are your thoughts on the proposed expansion of I-15?

- Where?

- Farmington to Salt Lake.

- Oh, okay, yeah.

Look, so I would love to not ever have to expand our freeways, but we are a growing state and we do so always very cautiously and with an understanding that we will never be able to add enough freeway lanes over the course of time to meet all of our needs as a state and so I think you have to put that decision in context with other decisions that are being made as well and that is additional investment in transit, for sure, making sure that we are looking at other ways of increasing the ability of, other infrastructure projects that will increase the ability of people to get where they need to go as quickly as possible, and yet, we know that we have to expand north to match what has already been done south of Salt Lake City so this is something that has been planned for a long time.

It will not solve all of our problems and I assure you that UDOT and UTA are also very aware that this is not, we can't just keep adding freeway lanes.

So this expansion is very important, but one of the changes that we made last year that I think is also very important is to give the planning for transit expansion, move that under UDOT when it comes to major expenditures from the state.

Those two things historically have never been done together.

It was Transit kind of doing their thing and the Department of Transportation doing their thing.

For the first time in our state's history now, Transit and the Department of Transportation aren't just talking, but they're actually planning together and making decisions going forward and so I think you'll start to see over the course of the next couple years, a much more integrated system and that's something that I support and I'm excited about.

- Governor, on transit, UDOT says it'll take minimum six years to finish the front runner double track, about as long as it took the US to reach the moon.

- Yeah.

- Are you comfortable with the pace of- - Oh, I'm not comfortable with the pace of building anything in this country and that's very frustrating to me.

That's not a function of UDOT or UTA, that's a function of the just arcane and Byzantine processes that we have to go through to build things in this state.

Some of those are local issues for sure, many of them are not and because there's a federal funding component to some of this, there are lots of federal permitting laws that we have to go through that just add time and expense to any big projects that we take.

I can tell you that this is something that I brought up personally with the President.

He agrees with us on this one.

It's something, we've met, actually, I formed a working group, a task force of governors, a bipartisan group of governors across the nation.

Governor Edwards in Louisiana is my Co-Chair, Democrats and Republicans working together on trying to find ways, so Governor Stitt in Oklahoma, Governor Pritzker in Chicago, a bunch of us working together to try to do more of this.

We've been reaching out to Congress as well.

Again, the administration, just yesterday we met with Mitch Landrieu with the White House expressing our concerns and our encouragement to work on some permitting reform and some changes to federal law that will allow us to build things much more quickly.

They all agree.

All of this infrastructure money that Congress just passed and that the President signed into law that he's touting and is very proud of and yet none of this is going to get built for decades if we don't make some of these changes and I think they understand that.

I've been told, it's been reported, I think the Wall Street Journal reported this, that as part of the debt ceiling discussions, there are some discussions about compromise over permitting reform, and that may be too much to ask for, but it seems like this is one of those rare things that Republicans and Democrats agree on, at least in principle, if not on the execution of that, so I'm hoping that over the course of the next year, we'll see some major changes, but we have the money.

That's what's frustrating.

You have the money, but you can't build it and it's maddening to me that we could, you know, the one that that comes up often is, maybe it was the, one of the big buildings, I don't remember which one in New York that was built in like a year and now it takes us, you know, it takes us 10 years to get a permit to build a building.

That's very frustrating to me.

- Governor, with the Utah Geological Survey yesterday they presented to lawmakers and the Director of the Survey said, "The legislature needs to give municipalities more teeth to say no to developers when it comes to landslides and mudslides because they say that too many homes are being built in areas that are too prone to landslides."

Do you agree the legislature needs to give municipalities more teeth to say no to developers?

- Well, it's certainly worth looking at and I've had some conversations with the mayor of Draper, where we had obviously one of those areas that slid and talked about how their hands may have been tied in that.

We're still trying to find this balance of making sure that municipalities aren't just saying no to everything because that's led to the rising price of housing in the state, but making sure they're also not saying yes to development in very dangerous places and so I think we can rebalance that piece as well and I've expressed an interest in exploring that, making sure that we are, you know, we are doing enough in those areas that could cause problems as we saw in that tragedy.

- Governor, you know, Utah sports fans are upset that San Antonio got another number one draft pick and Utah stayed at ninth.

But we're in a strange situation where Salt Lake City or Utah may be in line to get an MLB team and a hockey team, an NHL team, possibly the Coyotes from Phoenix.

What do you think about that?

Have you been talking with not just Ryan Smith, but with people in those leagues about those possibilities?

- Yeah, so what do I think about it?

I'm incredibly excited.

It's something that many of us as a self-described sports fan myself feel very strongly about getting these opportunities here.

I think it's good for just the fabric of our communities.

I think it's good for the economy of our communities and I just think it's good for, it's good for the soul.

Baseball's good for the soul, hockey's fun.

I think there are, I think these are wonderful opportunities and I'm grateful that we have people like the Smiths and like the Millers who are pursuing these opportunities.

I couldn't think of better ambassadors for our state than Ashley and Ryan Smith than Gail Miller and her family and very excited.

We have had some conversations over the past couple years with both of those groups of ownership about what they're hopeful for and what they're looking towards.

Those are high-level discussions.

I haven't been involved in any of the negotiations for those teams and so I certainly can't speak to that, but what I can say is that just being in the mix is incredible.

I think it speaks to the growth that we've had and the success that we've had as a state and the way that the rest of the nation views us now versus maybe the way they viewed us 20 years ago, that has definitely changed.

We are not a smaller state anymore.

We are firmly in that middle tier of states and from an economic perspective, from just a public relations perspective, Utah is seen much differently than it has been in the past and that's good news for us.

I do think that both of those opportunities, I don't think it's just PR.

I don't think it's just kind of a wish.

I think there's actual substance behind both of those and so we'll see.

It doesn't mean they'll happen.

It's possible that neither of them happen, but I would say it's more likely than not that we get it at least one, if not both of those over the course of the next few years.

- That said, Governor, you get the power to choose the team name for an MLB team in Utah.

What do they call it?

- That will never happen, so I'm not worried about it.

I'm not good on the creative side of things.

I'm more good on the execution side of things, so I will definitely let someone else figure that piece out, but there have been lots of names that are out there and I'm just, honestly, I'm giddy that we're even having these discussions.

- Governor, what do you think about what Governor Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida with this controversial immigration laws?

Do you agree?

You don't agree?

Do you see that happening here in Utah at some point or not?

- Sure, so I'm maybe not as familiar with the exact changes that you're referring to, but what I can say from an immigration standpoint, and I've been very outspoken on this since before I was governor and that has continued and that is that we absolutely have to do more to secure the border, first and foremost, that is critical.

We live in an ordered society, a society of laws, and that piece matters and I think this administration has done a terrible job of enforcing border security, but so have lots of administrations.

I mean, Congress has abdicated their responsibility around immigration for the last 40 years.

They've punted every time so it's hard to blame any single administration when really this problem lies at the feet of Congress.

At the same time, one of the ways to help the immigration problem at the border is to fix legal immigration and I've also been as passionate about that piece as well.

We do need more immigrants in our country.

We have so many job openings right now in the state of Utah and in other places that that cannot be filled.

It's actually hurting our economy that we can't have good people that want to live here, come in here, and in fact, when you have a broken immigration system, it ends up pushing people to go through the back door instead of the front door and to go through the wrong ways instead of the right ways and so I don't think those things are mutually exclusive.

I don't think that Americans think those things are mutually exclusive.

I don't think Republicans think that.

I don't think Democrats think that.

I think Republicans and Democrats are actually aligned on what we need to do around immigration reform.

The only people that don't get this are the politicians and they are the problem.

Congress is the problem right now among immigration.

States should not be trying to fix this.

The Constitution is very clear that immigration is a federal issue, but states have to step in because these imbeciles in Congress can't get their crap together to do something that everybody knows needs to be done and that is to protect the border and to fix legal immigration.

And all they wanna do is get reelected by pointing fingers at each other and they divide us and they do it on purpose and it's embarrassing and they should all get fired.

- Governor, on that note- - So that is all the time, sorry to interrupt, that's all the time we have for our television broadcast.

Thank you so much 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.

(gentle upbeat music)