- [Jason] On this special episode of "The Hinckley Report," Utah's legislature will meet in a high profile Special Session to address major issues.

What are the rules on who will call them into session?

What controversial issues are on the table.

And how will it impact the 2026 General Session?

- [Narrator] Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by The Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund.

(lively music) (lively music continues) - Good evening and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

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

Covering the week we have Ben Winslow, political reporter with FOX 13 News.

Kate Bradshaw, member of the Bountiful City Council.

And Glen Mills.

a political expert and analyst.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Big couple weeks in politics, and we are going to do a forecast tonight of the Special Session that is going to be called very soon.

Our legislature is gonna be meeting, talking about some very interesting issues, and we're gonna talk about what some of those might be.

Might be a couple surprises.

I wanna talk about how that works as well.

But let's first get into how a Special Session is called.

Up until 2018, this was the governor calling a Special Session.

Ben, talk about what that means when it's said the governor's going to call them into Special Session.

Clearly he's not yelling, he's doing something.

- No, he can if he wants I guess, but, you know, no.

The governor basically, this is the results of some carefully crafted negotiations between the Republican super majority and the governor about what's going to be on the Special Session, when you do this because it's also kind of expensive to just call lawmakers into a Special Session.

So they typically do it during interim session, just as a matter of economics.

But then you decide what issues you're going to take up.

A lot of these are cleanup bills, things that there were problems with legislation that has been passed.

Maybe it's something the governor has vetoed.

If they're mad enough at the governor, they could override the governor, you know?

Or there's new issues that are most pressing that they cannot wait for a General Session to tackle.

- Kate, it's interesting how this call historically has been put together, and up until 2018, which we'll talk about the change that happened there.

There was a negotiation between the legislature, and the governor about what he or she would put on that call.

Talk about the level of specificity.

How do they look at this when they say, "These are the things we're calling you to address."

Because if it's too general, the governor might not be happy with what they get.

- Well, Jason, as Ben mentioned, it's a carefully negotiated set of issues that go on the Special Session call.

Historically, there was a lot of discussion.

They were more rare.

There wasn't one every year.

It might happen every other year.

Even you'd skip two or three years between Special Sessions and they want to make sure that they know exactly what they're going to introduce.

And that's part of why there's a lot of negotiations behind the scenes.

And then what the governor lists on the call is very specific.

You don't want to necessarily call the legislature into a Special Session and reopen up every policy issue or every budget in the state.

So he's giving some specific guidance that, you know, says, for instance, "I want to see a bill that says, you know, we wear red on Fridays for game day."

- Oh, for the U, of course, yes, okay.

Okay.

Very interesting how this works.

And let's talk about what happened in 2018, Glen because there was an actual amendment, Amendment C, which maybe give us some of the circumstances around that because the state of Utah, the people of the state voted on the change about who can call or maybe adding some people who can call a Special Session.

- That's right, Amendment C, We could also call the Chafets Amendment.

And it has been-- - He did say that, yeah.

- Ben called that.

So if you remember back when Jason Chaffetz was representing one of our congressional districts in Washington, D.C., he decided to step aside midterm.

The governor at the time, Governor Herbert, decided instead of calling a Special Session to hash it out with the legislature on how they should proceed forward, he went ahead and called for a special election.

Obviously there was a bit of a power struggle there.

The legislature felt like they should have had their opportunity to chip in and decide how that process would go forward.

So they then asked voters for the opportunity or the power, I should say, to be able to call themselves into Special Session.

And that amendment did pass by the voters.

So ever since that point, the legislature has had the opportunity to call themselves into Special Session as well.

There are some stipulations that go along with that that can also be left to some interpretation.

So there has been some talk about that certainly since that time as well.

- I wanna get into a couple pieces, but Ben, this is a very interesting thing.

It did set up this power base, a little bit of a pool where it used to be the legislature had to work with the governor on this, not necessarily the case anymore.

Talk about what you have seen play out since 2018 when that power has been also reserved for the legislature.

- Well, this allows them to call themselves into Special Session when there is an emergency.

And we saw this supercharged during COVID because you were reacting so much to what was happening, you know, with federal changes, with finances, you know, rescue plans, things like that.

So we saw it really supercharged there.

But to Glen's point, there's some question of interpretation over what is the definition of an emergency?

What is the definition of an emergency to the legislature may not be the definition of an emergency for the people of Utah, but the voters did give them this power to do this.

What is interesting about this particular Special Session is that they're not really calling themselves into it.

They are working with the governor.

They are coming up with the agenda items that will be tackled.

- You know, Jason, during COVID, it's been mentioned, you know, there were a lot of Special Sessions because there were so many unprecedented issues that came up that we were dealing with.

But there were actually a time during COVID where you had both a legislatively called Special Session and a governor called Special Session that were happening simultaneously at the same time.

Certain bills were introduced under one mechanism and certain bills were introduced under another.

So it's really kind of complicated how we get to these Special Sessions, and whether you need to find compromise or whether you can feel strongly is just one branch of government.

- And the effect is the same.

They're still just meeting, they're still passing laws, they're still sending them to the governor, it's just who ends up being the person that calls and sets the agenda.

- And just more to Ben's point, like many things in politics, the definition of what an emergency is is subject to your own interpretation, in many cases.

I've even seen Senator Weiler, the parliamentarian in the Senate do some wink wink in the media.

Like, what does it really mean to call yourself into Special Session based on an emergency situation?

- Glen, since you brought it up, let me talk about a couple of these provisions.

This is about what we can do after this Amendment C and the Senate president, the House speaker.

So the way it would work is you can convene a Special Session up to 10 days, at least 10 days after the session.

30 days after the end of the regular session because they wanna get through the timeline.

And it had can only be happening by this.

These are the words, all right?

Wanna get to.

"A persistent fiscal crisis, war, natural disaster or emergency and state affairs.

You mean there's some wiggle room in what those mean?

- Well, I mean, I think everyone honestly has to answer that by saying yes because again, depending on how you want to interpret those things, some people will find a way to do so, while others to Ben's, I believe it was Ben's point, maybe the people of Utah don't really see it that way when the legislature might.

- Let's talk about what sets the stage for these sessions just a minute.

And Ben, you were referring to this a little bit.

Sometimes when the governor vetoes a piece of legislation and Governor Cox, particularly as of late, will actually issue a letter and say, "These are the reasons why I did a veto and this is what I would expect."

And some of these from this last session, the governor actually said, "I expect a Special Session for us to address some of these issues.

- Right, and this is what we call cleanup legislation.

You know, there may be a technical issue or, you know, there may be an interpretation or an unforeseen problem.

You pass a law, it is signed into law, then you start rolling it out and the effects of it, there's an issue.

And so you can go back and make modifications to that.

A lot of these bills that are being considered for the Special Session are very much cleanup legislation by definition just because the governor may not have been particularly happy with it or says, "I see an issue with this, let's just go back and make some modifications."

And that way people can live with it a little easier as it's, you know, practically applied.

- There's an interesting dynamic playing out in this one though because as you mentioned, the governor, at the end of the session, hinted to the fact that we will be going into Special Session this year.

We originally thought that that may happen in May.

Here we are into September now, and that still hasn't happened.

So obviously there's the negotiation going on for this one taking longer than we might've expected it to.

- [Jason] Go, Kate.

- You know, there's this list of bills that maybe were flagged for having an issue.

There was one that I worked on this legislative session involving property managers where an amendment just dropped off the system so it would've been adopted and voted on, but it just dropped off.

It was a clerical error.

And without it, the bill doesn't, you know, make as much sense.

And so they need to catch that up.

And so that gets listed early on in these discussions is like truly no one objects, it's a cleanup.

Let's just fix this.

Then there's what Glen's talking about where once there's the idea of a Special Session out there, then everyone has an emergency.

And so then it becomes, do you convince the legislature it's an emergency?

Do you convince the governor?

Can you convince both of them?

And it becomes what we call Christmas trees.

How many ornaments can you hang on the Special Session?

And so that's often where the more interesting issues are is not these technical cleanups that have been signaled and flagged very early on, but really these other items that come up that aren't necessarily truly technical easy fixes.

- I love that reference 'cause that's really what it is is anything can happen with a Special Session if you just get the will to put it on the agenda.

- And the other thing that's always interesting about a Special Session, during the General Session, the 45 days, right?

Everything has to compete with everything else for time, attention, money, energy in the session, right?

You're competing and is this really a priority to deal with for the state of Utah while you're, you know, rubbing up against all these other issues that are at play?

In a Special Session, you don't have the competition.

And some of that competition in a General Session helps, you know, weed out which things are really important.

And so in a Special Session, something gets a lot of attention, but it also moves through even quicker.

And so it's a different dynamic, which is why they're supposed to truly be special.

- Okay, Glen, I wanna talk about what's to come a little bit.

We're doing a little bit of a preview here because a lot may change whatever this, if it is a Christmas tree of sorts, it means people are trying to negotiate right now what they might get on this call.

And we know some, so let's talk about some that we've at least had some hints about, realizing there may be others that are going to come up depending how successful people are arguing.

One of them that we have received the signal on, it deals with the courts themselves.

Talk about this.

This goes back to Senate Bill 296, about the length of the term of the Chief Justice and who selects the Chief Justice.

Talk about that for just a moment and then we'll see what the governor has to say about it.

- Yeah, you bet.

This is a bill that the governor actually vetoed after the legislative session.

And the legislature obviously was interested in bringing it back up, and continuing those negotiations with the governor.

Essentially the bill, as it was vetoed, would require the governor to select the Chief Justice as opposed to the justices getting together to do so.

And then they would have to re-up every four years.

Part of the negotiation is to change that four years to eight years.

And the governor, when he vetoed the bill, was saying, "Obviously there would be benefit to me in doing so, but just because it would benefit me doesn't mean I should do it."

But now we're hearing him talk differently about the compromise.

- Yeah, so they have come up with a compromise and I wanna show this video clip from the governor talking about a little bit of his concerns that Glen just mentioned and why he may be okay with this compromise.

And Ben, if you'll respond to this after we watch this video from the governor.

- I'm responding to a legislature who believes very strongly in this, much more strongly than I do.

You know, if it was up to me, I would've left it alone, but it's not up to me.

They can run bills and maybe they could have overridden my veto, maybe not, but with this change, and I'd already signaled to them that I could support it if there were changes made, and they'd been willing to make those changes.

And so that's why I support it.

- Talk about that 'cause some changes have been made and some negotiations happened.

- This bill came out of a series of legislation during the General Session that went after the judiciary.

Lawmakers have made it very clear they have not been exactly thrilled with a lot of the court rulings that the Supreme Court and lower court judges have been making on some hot button issues.

Usually bills passed by the legislature that somebody sues over.

So this was part of a series of bills.

Through negotiations, a lot of those bills that took aim at the judiciary went away, except for this one, which obviously still stuck around.

This is also worth pointing out though, this happens on a federal level too.

This is not unprecedented here that the governor or the executive would choose the Chief Justice, but it was obviously the timetable of, you know, how often do you come back to the legislature and appear before a panel and answer questions about, you know, are you doing a good job or not?

And so then they've obviously negotiated to this point where it appears it's something that the governor is comfortable signing, even though he believes it still gives the executive branch too much power.

- Talk about that for just a moment because it does extend.

So the idea I think from the governor was take some of the politics out of it when it's not, you know, coinciding with an election or the governor being reelected.

- It does take some of the politics out of it.

It's interesting.

This is, as both Ben and Glen have mentioned, this is something maybe the legislature feels strongly about, not the governor obviously from his comments in his press conference.

And the question I think is do the people feel strongly about this either?

And should it be a Special Session item or should it be heard in regular order in a General Session where we compare it to all the other things that are happening with the judiciary?

You know, the governor in his veto letter had a line that went something like, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

And so I think that's an interesting question.

Should we be changing it?

Is there a reason to?

Sure there are other models.

This model has worked fairly well for Utah.

Is there a clamor broadly from the public to change this?

I don't know that there is, but it appears we're going to discuss it.

- Yes, we are.

- Just one last point on that.

I do expect this to be the only judicial bill addressed in the Special Session, but that issue, the underlying issue of this power struggle between the legislature and the judicial branch, I don't expect that to go away.

- Well, particularly since it seems like the courts and the legislature in the middle of something right now and redistricting, right, Ben?

- Right, we are still cruising for that battle.

It is, with obviously Judge Gibson's ruling, throwing out the congressional maps.

We may see yet another Special Session when we do finally get new maps that have to be discussed and voted upon.

And if that's enough to pass the approval of the judge, whether it complies with the ruling about Proposition 4 and the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government's lawsuit.

My notwithstanding another trip to the Supreme Court.

All of this is very legally complicated.

I'm sorry, viewers.

This is a very, very legally messy situation.

But yeah, we may be back with more of this and the tension still exists between the judicial and the legislative branches.

- As we talk about this, this is something that can pop up on a Special Session, right, Kate?

What you're hearing out there, whether we see it, you know, this next week or a couple weeks after that because it can happen pretty quickly.

- Yeah, so you know, the traditional path when we do our census and then we adopt new maps every decade, those are traditionally done in a Special Session so that they can have them done and adopted in advance of filing after a census.

So it's not uncommon that you would, in fact, it would be the regular order to adopt congressional maps usually in a Special Session after you've had a redistricting committee, and you've had public comments, and then you would adopt these maps later in the fall so that you could be ready for filings in January.

The timing issue here is that you will have congressional elections in 2026 in that filing window.

The legislature has moved up and so now it appears that it's that first week of January, which then, you know, backs in the dates of when county clerks need to be ready with that paperwork for people to file.

And so they'll know what district they're in, and be able to prepare all of those things.

So it puts us under a real tight time constraint.

And so we do anticipate that not only will we have, you know, a Special Session coming up in early September, we'll probably have another one in either late September or early October to address this ruling and the new maps that are going to be needed.

- All the while both Speaker Schultz and President Adams have made it clear they're going to seek this through the courts as well.

They're hopeful that the Supreme Court may jump in and stay this.

Whether that'll happen is probably unlikely.

But they have also raised a federal question that could potentially take it to the US Supreme Court as well.

- Watch that one very closely and certainly you might see that pop up on one of these next Special Sessions.

Another item, Ben that might come up has to do with some pretty interesting work in the community on labor unions.

Talk about this one 'cause we might have a compromise.

- To be determined really, at least the last words I've gotten is "Stay tuned."

It's still being discussed but as everybody remembers, the bill, the now law that prohibited the public employee unions from collective bargaining was the subject of a referendum.

And not only did they get the signatures, they got a lot of signatures.

And so that is going to likely be on next year's ballot unless the legislature repeals or modifies the original law that they passed.

The labor unions say you either repeal it or you send it to the voters.

We will accept nothing in between.

It remains to be seen what the legislature's actually gonna do about that.

But I'm not sure that many lawmakers have the appetite to have this on the ballot with other constitutional amendments that they would like to see passed.

If you have such an issue that is likely to draw a big crowd.

- [Jason] Go ahead.

- Compounded, of course, by the fact that we'll be dealing with these new maps that we were just discussing.

And so if you have new maps and you have, you know, a district that maybe leans more Republican or more Democrat, will these issues on the 2026 ballot drive a certain demographic to turn out and you know, really impact these new congressional maps?

I also think it's really interesting, you know, Utah has very difficult signature gathering laws for ballot initiatives and referendums.

And the fact that they were able to gather two times more than the signatures they needed, I think is signaling to the legislature that maybe they weren't quite, you know, with the public on this particular issue.

You know, collective bargaining for public sector employees is about pay, particularly for teachers, firefighters and police officers.

And there's probably not a lot of people who think that those groups are particularly overpaid for the tremendous work they do.

- Glen, talk about the impact of sort of the effort that went into this.

As Ben just talked about, over 320,000 signatures.

They needed 140,000 signatures.

Can I just talk about how that dynamic plays out in the legislative process and why this may end up on the Special Session?

- Yeah, it's incredibly impressive.

It's hard to get the 140,000, let alone more than doubling it.

So a really impressive effort on their part, and as has already been mentioned, it indicates that there is strong support for that.

And because of that, I believe that the legislature is going to repeal this bill.

They don't want it on the ballot, and as has been pointed out, anything that's modified is still gonna have to go through the fight process, through the courts potentially.

So I believe they're not gonna wanna deal with that and they're going to repeal it.

And if you remember the last time we had significant ballot measures on the ballot that drew the crowd, it was not a good night for Republicans, specifically in Salt Lake County.

- Yeah, I guess they do think of this in terms of election cycles also.

One more we may see, Ben.

Berms, the Great Salt Lake.

Let's talk about berms for a moment 'cause we understand this may be an item on the agenda.

- Right, and when you talk about, you know, emergencies that need a Special Session, certainly many would argue that the Great Salt Lake very much qualifies as an emergency to deal with.

And this is the first one that we heard Speaker Schultz say, "I absolutely want this on the Special Session agenda."

As we all know, the Great Salt Lake is in crisis.

It has dropped, it's flirting once again with record low levels.

And so berm management, this is the Union Pacific Causeway berm or causeway that kind of divides the north arm and the south arm of the lake.

Right now the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands has managed the lake as one.

So you don't raise the berm, which cuts off the north arm from the south arm.

You manage it as one.

That's partly why the water levels have been lower.

But it also helps maintain the salinity levels.

And what we don't want is ecosystem collapse.

That's a very, very bad thing.

So what you do by allowing this, what we're going to do in this bill essentially is it gives the state permission to do more management of this.

They can raise the berm and lower it, but they're gonna raise it temporarily, which as it's been likened to me, it's sort of like cutting off an arm to save the rest of the body.

And, you know, these are the tough choices you have to make.

Representative Koford, I talked to her, she's sponsoring this bill, and she says that this is temporary.

She insists this is not a permanent starve the north arm so that the south arm can live, which is where most of the population is.

She says that under her bill, they have 18 months to be able to do this, and then they have to come back to the legislature, and explain if they need an extension, why they need an extension, if this is necessary.

But she very much believes that yes, this is a way that we can help prop up the Great Salt Lake, you know, as they explore other measures to try to continue to get water into it.

- Kate, this is sort of your neck of the woods too.

Talk about these efforts, how the locals are engaging in this, and how this may impact this decision on this issue, and others with the Great Salt Lake.

- You're right.

As a resident of south Davis County, what happens with the lake and whether or not we're able to control dust, and other issues is really important to my area and the entire Wasatch Front.

You know, from a local government perspective, we're always looking at water conservation.

You know, what we can do to change how we treat water in our communities.

Cities up and down the Wasatch Front have changed their landscape standards in order to use less water to encourage people to xeriscape.

There are programs called Flip-Your-Strip that help people change their landscaping to use less water.

All of our general plans that cities must adopt have a new requirement to do water use planning because this is, you know, a very limited resource.

And so it dovetails with some of these things they're doing at the state legislative level to try and make sure that we save the lake.

More needs to be done I think because raising the berm feels very much like an emergency issue.

And so hopefully we can continue to work on some of the other issues that will provide more long-term stability.

- We only have a couple minutes left.

We've talked about ones we've got a pretty good signal on, some things we haven't.

All right, Glen, others, what else are you hearing may be on this Special Session just to kind of get your crystal ball out for just a moment.

Tell us what else you're hearing.

- Yeah, I think I've already alluded to this a little bit.

I think there are some lawmakers that would like to get more judicial bills on the agenda.

I don't think that's going to happen, but there are definitely some works behind the scenes to try to go after the judiciary the way the legislature thinks they need to.

- Okay.

Ben.

- At this point, anything can happen.

It's just gonna wash over me like a tidal wave from the Great Salt Lake.

(all chuckling) - A tidal wave from the Great Salt Lake.

Kate, one more that you're hearing 'cause there's a lot of these governance levels dealing with counties in particular.

- Yes, there is what usually is kinda a boring process.

It's called a recodification, a recod for short, where you are just reorganizing a section of code to just clean it up.

Over time the code gets out of line and messy.

So we're looking at a recod of the county section, Title 17, but it's interesting to do it in a Special Session.

So what's going on there?

- Well, they're also gonna do a recodification of the higher education section of the code.

Why do they do this?

And also maybe you just speculate just a tad on why do that in a Special Session.

- So as I mentioned, over time as you pass bills and the bills need to then be slotted into the code, sometimes it gets messy.

Something that was supposed to be in the definition section ends up somewhere else.

And so they'll go in periodically and reorganize to make sure definitions all appear together and, you know, if there's criminal penalties, those all appear together.

And in order to pass bills on those topics later on in a General Session, you need to pass these recodification cleanups early on.

So they're doing the county section, Title 17, it sounds like the higher ed.

I know that they've signaled that municipalities, which are in Title 10, may see some of this as well.

So if you're doing this in a Special Session, it definitely signals that maybe there's some big changes coming in the General Session in those areas that they really wanted to get the cleanup done early.

- Of note in these recodifications, they're not supposed to have substantive changes.

These are supposed to be changes just in organization, things are bringing the code back up to speed.

Thank you so much for your brilliant insights.

I can't wait to see what happens in this Special Session.

It'll be big.

- It'll be the most special of sessions.

- You've heard it here from Ben.

Thank you so much for your insights and thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast.

We appreciate you being with us.

We'll see you next week.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (no audio)