The short version: Gabi will not be retracting anything. The longer version walks through each of Adams’ claims, the public records and reporting behind Gabi’s statements, and the extraordinarily high legal bar for a public official alleging defamation.

It also makes one thing very clear: criticism from a private citizen may be embarrassing or unpleasant for a powerful politician but that does not make it defamatory.

We would not normally publish legal correspondence like this. But Adams chose to post his demand publicly on X (initially with Gabi’s home and office addresses visible), and since he made his letter public, we think you should be able to read the response too. So here it is in full:

Response To Stuart Adams' Demand

321KB ∙ PDF file

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In the meantime, we figured this was another excellent opportunity to make some merch.

The good people on Instagram suggested, “Stick It to the Man” so we ran with it.

Proceeds will help cover Gabi’s legal expenses and prepare for whatever comes next. So, if you believe powerful politicians should not be able to bully people into silence, get your shirt here.

Chip in to help us cover the legal bills and keep doing the work that got us this letter in the first place.

But the school bells are ringing, summer is over and we are officially back. And what better way to begin a new school year than by reviewing the first report cards for Utah’s political class?

Utah politicians might have been hoping for a fresh start to this electoral season, but unfortunately for them, voters remember last semester. The Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics released a poll on Monday. Here is what it found:

Spencer Cox: 41% approve, 49% disapprove. In January, he was at 51/37 — that’s a 10% difference.
Mike Lee: 39% approve, 46% disapprove. He was at 47/37 in February — 8% drop.
John Curtis: 37% approve, 38% disapprove.
The Utah Legislature: 44% approve, 45% disapprove.

Every Utah elected official polled is now, what we in the business call, underwater.

Now, some of this is clearly just a universal feeling. Donald Trump went from a net-positive five points to a net-negative seven in Utah. Congress sank from negative 21 to negative 30. The economy is unstable, the cost of living is high, and data centers have become the one issue that can apparently unite everyone from Box Elder County ranchers to retired NFL centers (aka Taylor Swift’s brother-in-law). Garage Beer and Liquid Death launched an actual ad campaign this week asking fans to mail their urine to AI data centers to help cool them down, with one of America’s most famous football players, Jason Kelce, as the spokesman. That is a sentence we never thought we would type, let alone in a Utah politics newsletter.

But Cox lost ground with everybody. Republican approval of Cox fell from 69% to 61%. Democratic approval went from 26% to 18%. And the biggest change came from independents who dropped him from 45% to 26%. That is a 19-point collapse in seven months. Oof.

Even more striking, the share of Utahns who strongly disapprove of Cox nearly doubled, from 17% to 31%. His strong approval is now just 14%. That means, more than twice as many Utahns strongly disapprove of Spencer Cox as strongly approve of him. That’s tough.

So, while we love polling data and numbers as much as the next guy, in honor of back to school, we thought we deserve a little fun. And we just happen to have four sets of numbers sitting here that look suspiciously like test scores…

So let’s hand out report cards

Okay… before we turn the approval data into letter grades and everyone yells at us for unfair math, we know no politician is going to receive 100% approval. In this day and age, that’s impossible.

If we graded on a normal scale, every politician in America would fail and Congress would be sent to an alternative school in a portable building behind the building that Paris Hilton is probably protesting.

So we are going to be a generous teacher and grade on a curve. And this is our own special, made up curve so we can do whatever we want.

We need an A to actually mean something. Morning Consult ranks all fifty governors, and when Cox was sitting at 62% approval, FOX 13 reported he was the sixth-most-popular governor in America. Sixth out of fifty. So roughly 60% approval demonstrably lands you in the top ten in the country, which is an A. That seems fair. Sure. Math. We are making all of this up.

Everything scales down from there:

60% or higher is an A. Top ten in the nation.
55% to 59% is a B.
50% to 54% is a C. Makes sense. Passing. Neutral.
45% to 49% is a D. D’s get degrees, you know.
Below 45% is an F.

All this to say, while we can be accused of a lot, this is a generous curve. A curve so generous the Utah Legislature might have drawn it for itself, then passed it in a special session at 11 p.m. on a Friday.

Spencer Cox: F

Cox entered office at 63% approval in February 2021. By that April, Deseret News reported he had climbed to 66%. And, while we could write about this all day but will spare you, 64% of Democrats and 62% of unaffiliated voters approved of him at that time.

In 2021, a Republican governor of Utah had a higher approval rating among Democrats than he now has among anybody. So that’s crazy. Like, truly remarkable.

In November 2021, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Morning Consult ranked him the tenth-most-popular governor in America. In early 2022, he climbed to sixth. By July 2023 he was holding steady at 63%, and MultiState reported that Cox had posted the largest year-over-year approval increase of any governor in the country. Most improved student, nationally, out of fifty. Honor roll. Class president. National Governors Association chair. The kid whose parents put the bumper sticker on the car.

We all know, Cox earned those grades by being the “reasonable Republican.” He talked about kindness and civility and cried on Ellen and he launched “Disagree Better.” Democrats did not always agree with him, but many believed he was thoughtful, decent and actually interested in governing.

Then he started copying off the wrong kid’s paper.

By April 2025, Cox dropped to 52%. The initial decline came almost entirely from Democrats, whose approval of him collapsed 26 points, from 54% to 28%, between April 2023 and April 2025. Those were the years when Cox endorsed Trump following the July 2024 assassination attempt, signed the pride flag ban, packed the supreme court, and got booed at his own party’s convention.

By November 2025 he was at 50% during the redistricting fight, with Democratic approval down to 22%. January 2026 he was at 51%, holding a C the way you hold a C in a class where you are calculating the grade you need to get on the final to not fail.

Then came the Stratos data center fight. Cox called the scientists and residents raising concerns “people operating off of models and technologies that have changed drastically,” dismissed their concerns as “disinformation,” and then said this:

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore. And those days are over. We’re done with that.”

As we wrote at the time, the people he was describing had driven many miles on a work night to a fairground in Tremonton. Farmers, ranchers, doctors, professors, parents. They are not against everything. They were against one specific thing, for specific documented reasons.

He later scaled the project back to Phase I, posted that “healthy disagreement is part of good government,” and conceded to Deseret that the rollout “wasn’t great.”

Now Cox is at 41%. An F on a curve where he only needed 45% to stumble into a D.

And the decline no longer belongs to just Democrats. His own study group, the Republicans and Independents who carried him for years, started packing up their backpacks too.

That’s pretty politically humiliating. One of America’s most popular governors four years ago is now polling numerically worse in Utah than Donald Trump AND Mike Lee. For the guy that spent years trying to prove he belonged in their group project. Congratulations. His approval rating finally does.

Mike Lee: F

Conduct: Needs improvement. (Hopefully dispelled soon.)
Teacher’s note: Mike participates frequently, although rarely on the assigned subject. Does not accept feedback without accusing the grader of socialism.

Lee is at 39% approval and 46% disapproval. He has been underwater before, so this is familiar weather for him. What is unusual is that his approval among Republicans fell from 73% to 63%. His approval among Democrats fell from 23% to 10%, which is insane that he was at 23% to begin with, but that’s just us.

Mike remains confident the problem is everyone else. That confidence hasn’t shown up in his work, his crusade to sell off public lands, or his judgment the weekend a Minnesota lawmaker was shot dead in her home and he joked about it being what Marxists do.

Utah Legislature: F

Gotta give it to them, the Legislature, with their supermajority control is certainly productive. Republican bills pass at around 70%. According to BYU political scientist Adam Brown, Democratic bills passed at just 26% in 2026, the worst rate in the 17 years he has tracked it.

Utah lawmakers are excellent at completing assignments they gave themselves.

And even by their own generous curve, the class average is slipping. The Legislature was pulling a 49% approval in early 2026. By August it had dropped to 44%, its first net-negative grade in years, right alongside the governor’s.

John Curtis: Incomplete

Curtis is at 37% approval and 38% disapproval, but more than a quarter of Utah voters say they do not know how they feel about him. That is roughly double the don’t-know rate for Cox or Lee.

This is interesting as a comparison to a test, because “I don’t know” technically doesn’t count against him. So Curtis is building a Senate career on the one test in America that does not penalize you for leaving it blank.

Curtis recently completed a 250-mile walk across Utah, from Dingle, Idaho to the Stadium of Fire in Provo, in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. He bought billboards and handed out commemorative socks with his own face stitched into them. Unfortunately, the route did not appear to pass through the political consciousness of one-quarter of his constituents. That is a remarkable comedown for someone who maintained a roughly 93% approval rating during his final years as Provo mayor. Curtis has already proven he can be extremely popular in one Utah city. The statewide expansion not going as well.

Eighteen months into his Senate term, Curtis is not failing. He has not been graded.

The lesson Utah’s leaders keep failing

So what is our final takeaway here? Cox, Lee and Curtis will not be on the ballot this November. But their classmates will.

Cox sells civility. Lee sells combat. Curtis sells a quieter, more pragmatic conservatism. The Legislature sells efficiency. All have very different personalities. Different brands. Yet, nearly identical report cards.

The common failure is not ideology. It is the growing belief that Utah’s leaders make decisions first, ask questions later, and treat public input like an annoying requirement instead of the assignment.

When one party is the only student enrolled in the course, it remains at the top of the class no matter what score it receives. Nobody ever has to send that report card home. But this week, Utah voters just told every incumbent in the state that they noticed. The only question left is whether anyone shows up to hold them accountable. And when those voters go looking for something different, who will be standing there?

That is your assignment. It is due in November. Class dismissed. Pencils down.

In this episode, we finally unpack Utah’s unusually brutal Republican primary. After years of politically fucking around, several Republican incumbents finally “found out.”

We break down what happened, why these races mattered, what the Stratos data center had to do with it, and what the results could mean for Utah politics heading into November.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

But as we looked at this milestone, we wanted to say something anyway. Not because the country feels simple to celebrate right now. The line between full patriotism and full doom feels pretty thin these days, and neither one felt especially honest.

So we each wrote our own reflection. The three of us came at this from different places and different experiences, but we kept circling the same idea: loving a country does not mean pretending it has kept all of its promises. It means believing those promises still matter enough to fight over.

Jackie’s Reflection

On July 3rd I flew home from Europe after a much needed vacation. And because I apparently don’t believe vacations should include rest, I’d spent part of the trip hiking Mount Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia.

In Slovenia, there’s a saying that you have to climb Triglav once in your life to become a true Slovenian. It’s a national symbol, a real source of pride, and, as several Slovenians were eager to point out, a status not automatically granted to every Slovenian export. Melania Trump, for instance.

I hadn’t trained enough. It was a tough climb and yet I still made it. At the summit, I expected the usual mountain top things: a view, a photo, a snack. Instead I was met by a man playing the accordion.

As someone who had barely carried herself to the top, I cannot overstate how impressive this was. He and his friends played Slovenian songs. They sang together, arms around each other, waving flags, passing around medica, a local honey liqueur, with shot glasses they’d also hauled up the mountain because why not once you have the accordion. A couple nearby took each other’s hands and danced.

I got emotional. Watching them sing on the highest point in their country, I thought: this is what patriotism is supposed to feel like. They loved where they were from enough to climb something hard and beautiful and sing and dance about it at the top.

And frankly, I was jealous. Not because I wanted to be Slovenian, though they made a strong case. I wanted that same uncomplicated pride in my own country. I wanted to be the kind of person who could carry a flag and a warm PBR to a summit and sing “America the Beautiful” without also feeling like I needed to explain myself.

I want patriotism I’m proud of. Not the kind that asks me to ignore history, excuse cruelty, applaud corruption or corporations, or pretend the people yelling loudest about America are doing anything to make it better.

I want to love this country out loud. For me and for a lot of people, that feels hard right now. It’s hard to travel and get apologies or jokes when you say where you’re from.

Patriotism seems to have been flattened into performance of who can be loudest, fly the biggest flag, set off the biggest firework, say “freedom” the most times while doing the least to protect anyone else’s.

And then those same people tell the rest of us that criticizing the country means hating it.

I don’t hate it. That’s the problem.

I love this place enough to be heartbroken by it. I love Utah enough to be furious when people treat it like a resource to extract from instead of a place to protect.

The opposite of patriotism isn’t criticism. It’s abandonment. I’m not interested in abandoning this country to people who think loving it means never asking it to be better.

That’s what I kept thinking about on that mountain. The Triglav tradition isn’t just about standing somewhere beautiful. It’s really about the climb. Nobody hands you a flag at the bottom and tells you to feel something. You do the climb. You sweat. You complain. You keep going, with other people, and if you’re lucky, someone brings an accordion.

Maybe that’s the patriotism I can still believe in. Not the performance of patriotism. The effort.

We prefer the clean version of American history: hot dogs, apple pie, heroes already known, speeches already written. But nobody living through history knows how the chapter ends. Congresswoman Sarah McBride made this point well by saying: someone enslaved in the 1850s had no reason to think emancipation was coming. A worker in the early years of the Great Depression had never heard of a New Deal. Gay and trans people in the 1950s had no reason to believe they’d ever get to live openly and legally as themselves. They had every reason to give up, and yet people kept going anyway.

Neither did the suffragists. Neither did the labor organizers. Neither did the civil rights workers. Neither did the people who lost the first vote, the first lawsuit, the first campaign, and kept going anyway.

History only looks inevitable after someone else survives it. Which means if this moment feels confusing and unfinished, we’re not outside of history. We’re in it. And if we’re in it, we’re not just watching. We’re participants.

That’s what I want to remember on America’s 250th. Not because I feel uncomplicated pride. I don’t. Not because America has lived up to its promises. It hasn’t. But because there’s still something worth carrying. A version of this country that shows up in public libraries, national parks, and neighborhood parades. In election workers, firefighters, local reporters, and neighbors who share eggs over the fence.

That’s the country I want to love.

So no, I’m probably not climbing the Empire State Building with a flag and a PBR anytime soon. But I want a patriotism I’m not embarrassed to carry. One that can say this is broken and this is beautiful in the same breath, because love was never the same thing as approval.

Loving a country is like climbing a mountain you’re not fully prepared for. You don’t get to skip the hard parts. You climb because the view might still be worth it, because other people are climbing too, and because someone has to carry the music.

And when you get to the top, if you’re lucky, you remember that pride doesn’t have to be cruel, joy doesn’t have to be naive, and patriotism doesn’t have to belong to the loudest person with the biggest fireworks.

It can belong to the people still willing to do the work. It can belong to us.

Gabi’s Reflection:

Lawrence, Kansas, a small college town about 40 miles from Kansas City, became the Algerian national team’s official base camp for the World Cup. Nobody made them, but the municipal government and the local tourism board decided to fully adopt a team from a country that most of the town had likely never really thought about. They had a massive Algerian flag created in the grass of City Hall. They hosted public watch parties for every match until Algeria went out in the Round of 32. About 800 people showed up to watch that flag get raised, and the man who’d organized it said afterward that the crowd had goosebumps, that he’d never seen people that joyful over a ceremony, and that none of it was really about the flag or the game. It was the embrace of the community and trying to make the team from a small African nation feel as welcome as possible in a midwestern city.

A town in Kansas learned to care about a country most of its residents couldn’t have pointed to on a map, and did it loudly enough that the players, the coaches, and the country noticed.

That’s the version of this country I’ve been watching this summer, and it’s the version I want to write about today.

Hosting the World Cup during America's 250th has produced some of the best evidence I've seen in years for what this country can be. I watched two Congo fans in a bar get pulled into a chorus of cheers by strangers in Mexico, Colombia, and Croatia jerseys when their team scored, none of them knowing each other's names, some of them not speaking the same first language, all of them deciding in the moment that a goal is a goal and joy doesn't have opponents. My friends in Boston have been sending me videos of them drinking the bars dry with the Scotts, learning Scottish phrases, and planning trips to go visit their new friends. Boston even got a new sister city: Glasgow.

And all over the country, I’ve watched immigrants and the children of immigrants wear the jersey of the place their family came from, in public, in the United States, because this country, whatever else it’s done to them or for them, is also the place that lets that be true, and they are what have made this country the best of what it can be.

I’ve spent some rowdy and wonderful afternoons watching the Colombia men’s national team with my partner, who came to the U.S. from Colombia at eleven years old, at a bar in Salt Lake that fills up with yellow jerseys covered in butterflies each time they play. I’ve watched him find dozens of strangers who understand something about him instantly, and he them, without explanation, in a way that doesn’t happen for a lot of people who come here from somewhere else. I’ve watched the pride, the joy, the way total strangers look out for each other’s drinks and toes and flags. It’s a kind of belonging I don’t think I’d ever really seen up close before, and it’s made me think a lot about what I actually mean when I say I love this country, especially on the days I don’t feel it at all.

So when the U.S. men played on July 1st, I went looking for that same feeling. I wanted what he’d had at the Colombia games: pride, excitement, a room full of people who felt connected to something bigger than themselves.

Instead, I got a watch party that looked like a fraternity formal with a flag theme, and by the second half, I mostly felt embarrassed. Some of that isn’t fair to the room. I don’t know who anyone voted for, or whether they voted at all. But there’s a specific kind of anger that shows up when you watch people chant USA while the government currently running the USA is busy gutting the freedoms the chant is supposed to be about. “Freedom 250” hats worn by people who’ve never had to think about the two and a half centuries this country spent making sure freedom didn’t apply to everyone. Two of the goals that night were scored by players on the U.S. roster because of immigration and birthright citizenship, while the flag stitched onto their own kits is currently being used by a government trying to make sure that can’t happen again. And after the game, some Bosnia and Herzegovina fans told me they’d been booed and heckled for cheering for their own team, a few days after I’d watched fans from three continents adopt each other’s goals as their own.

The gap was impossible not to see. But I don’t think the gap is the story. I think the story is that both rooms exist in the same country, in the same week, and only one of them requires you to already belong to be welcome in it.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men signed a document that starts with a claim most of them didn’t actually believe applied to everyone in the room, let alone everyone in the colonies: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. They also wrote that governments exist to secure those rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government stops doing that, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

I love American history, and I love this document. I love it the way you love something you’ve actually read closely enough to argue with. And what gets lost every year, especially from people who want to wave it at protestors while ignoring what it says, is that it isn’t a monument. It’s an instruction manual for when things go wrong, written by people who had just decided their own government had gone wrong.

We’ve spent 250 years being a country that enslaved, displaced, imprisoned, deported, and legislated against the majority of the people living inside its borders. That’s not an unpatriotic thing to say on the Fourth of July. It’s the precondition for the actual patriotic thing, which is this: every real expansion of who gets to be free in this country came from people, not from the government handing it down out of generosity. Emancipation. Women’s suffrage. Civil rights. Workers rights. Marriage equality. None of it was a gift from Washington. It was extracted, argued, marched, and sued into existence by people the country wasn’t built to protect.

Sojourner Truth. Ida B. Wells. Inez Milholland, who collapsed on a suffrage stage and kept speaking, then died on the campaign trail before the 19th Amendment passed. Dolores Huerta, who spent decades building the farmworkers’ movement alongside Cesar Chavez and only this year told the country what he did to her, decades after the fact, at 95 years old, and is still standing. Zitkála-Šá, fighting for Native citizenship and sovereignty while being told she wasn’t American enough to have opinions about America. Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X, who wanted the same freedom by a different road. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans women of color who started a movement that eventually got us Jim Obergefell’s name on a Supreme Court case that made marriage equality the law of the country. None of these people waited for permission. All of them were told outright, by the government of the day, that what they were asking for wasn’t on offer. They asked anyway. Most of them didn’t live to see the answer.

That’s the founding principle nobody put on a hat this summer: when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government. The people who wrote that weren’t instructing future generations to sit quietly and trust the process. They were telling us what to do when the process stops working. Reading the Declaration closely, on purpose, on the day designed for flag-waving instead of reading, is itself a small act of taking the document more seriously than the people currently invoking it.

So here’s where I’ve landed, a few days removed from standing in a room that made me feel like a stranger in my own country. The America I actually believe in isn’t the one in the stadium chanting USA at people who came to cheer for their own team. It’s a Kansas town flying a flag most of its residents had never seen before, for a team almost nobody there had a personal reason to love, because loving it anyway was the whole point. It’s the bar full of butterflies and yellow jerseys where my loved one gets to be fully, proudly Colombian and fully at home at the same time. It’s fifty-six men who wrote something more radical than they were personally willing to live up to and left it lying around for the rest of us to finish. And it’s every name on that list above, and every name that never made it into a textbook, who did the work of making that promise real instead of waiting for someone in power to get around to it. We owe it to them not to let that work die.

From many, one. Not one man. Not one president. Not one party. One country, built and rebuilt over and over by people who refused to wait. That’s the version I’m celebrating this year. Happy Fourth.

Ben’s Reflection

I love the 4th of July. Still do. Growing up, with a birthday on January 3rd, I would celebrate in July.

My dad used to drive me up to buy illegal fireworks, and then we’d put on what we called the “cul-de-sac of fire”. Those are some of my favorite memories: driving from American Fork to Evanston, Wyoming, playing the license plate game, walking into a giant warehouse of fireworks that seemed almost too cool to be real. As a kid, knowing I was breaking the rules with my dad gave the Fourth of July an excitement I do not think most kids got. We had to be careful on the drive back from Wyoming.

Later, Park City showed me it also knows how to go all out for the Fourth: the Canyons on the third, the parade and City Park on the fourth, then ending the day on the golf course watching fireworks with all your friends. It was the kind of holiday that made everything feel bigger and louder and more magical than normal life.

I learned to shoot bottle rockets out of a PVC pipe with the other dads in the neighborhood once everyone had gone to bed. There was a cop who lived down the street who looked out for us. He would use the lights on his city car to help everyone clean up before bedtime, which now feels like the most Utah version of law enforcement possible. We stuck smoke bombs in places they definitely did not belong, mostly in the name of science. And the best part was that, because of the 24th, we had the whole month of July to do fireworks.

So yes, I am a little conflicted about the fireworks ban.

Not because I think the ban is wrong. It is not. Please do not buy or light fireworks this year. Utah is too dry, too hot, and too flammable for anyone’s patriotic nostalgia to become a group project for firefighters.

But I am conflicted because I know what the Fourth of July feels like when fireworks are part of your childhood. I know how much people love the noise and the glow and the ritual of it. I know there is a real loss in having to say, “Not this year,” to something that has always been tradition.

And that is exactly why the ban matters. Loving a place means knowing when the tradition has to change. It means admitting that something can be a beloved childhood memory and still be a bad idea right now. Hope is not lighting the fuse and assuming someone else will handle the consequences. Hope is protecting the hillside so there is still somewhere beautiful to watch the sunset tomorrow.

As a reminder, if you see illegal fireworks, report them through your local non-emergency line or your city or county’s reporting form. If there is an active fire, injury, or immediate danger, call 911. Otherwise, let’s reserve emergency lines for actual emergencies.

But, in the middle of all of this, a Utah legislator told people to go ahead and light up anyway because he happens to own a fireworks company and a fire ban is bad for business. He has since walked these comments back, after backlash.

I’m writing this after watching Cape Verde almost beat Argentina, and celebrating Colombia winning and making it to the Round of 16. I’m watching Independence Day as I write my section for this piece.

250 years is a big deal. I moved my flight home to DC to spend the 4th in Salt Lake, because being in DC during the saddest fair known to America seemed like too much. We’ve come a long way as a country, and I feel like hope is hard to find these days. I’m a big believer that cynics are full of shit. I do not mean people who are scared, angry, exhausted, or realistic. Those are all reasonable responses to the current situation. I mean the people who confuse hopelessness with intelligence. The people who think sounding detached makes them sound smart. The people who have already decided nothing can get better and want everyone else to join them in the emotional basement.

We do not need more people who sound smart without any hope. We need people who believe something better is possible and are willing to act like it.

If I were 22, or freshly graduated from college, I would understand why it might feel impossible right now. I was talking to a dear friend the other day whose kid does not see the point. Why try? AI might take their job. Climate change might ruin their future. Politicians do not listen. Everything feels shaped by forces so far outside their control that effort can seem almost embarrassing. I get that.

But I also think giving up is exactly what the worst people are counting on.

I think America offers things no other country does, and I’d like to set the fascism aside for a second. Because yes — we’re on stolen land, built on genocide, and forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day as kids, which I can assure you is not normal. Things are grim, fully acknowledged. But there are still reasons to have hope.

So here are a few reasons I still believe in this country, even when it is testing me personally.

1. Hot dogs exist

2. People are still welcoming to strangers, despite what our government seems determined to prove.

3. Air conditioning

4. The World Cup (even though we’re the first host to bomb a country that’s participating in it while it’s happening)

5. Hollywood still has it. Going to see a movie in a theater remains one of the best things in the world.

6. Tex-Mex. Read this Japanese fan’s take on being in America for the World Cup (bottomless chips and salsa slap)

7. Going to Target

8. Portion sizes

9. A road trip or driving coast to coast, seeing the vastness of our country

10. However far apart our politics get, most people still want roughly the same things for their kids

11. There are still people trying to make it better despite everything

The list could be much longer, and honestly, I would love to hear what is keeping you hopeful right now.

But here is what I know: we are going to keep trying. We are going to keep telling the truth. We are going to keep showing up. We are going to keep fighting for a country and a state that can be better than this.

And sometimes, tragically, patriotism is not the fun thing. Sometimes it is not the giant box of fireworks from Wyoming. Sometimes it is not the bottle rocket in the PVC pipe. Sometimes it is not the cul-de-sac of fire, however iconic the branding may be.

Sometimes patriotism is doing the boring, responsible thing because the place you love is dry as hell and full of people, animals, homes, hillsides, firefighters, and memories worth protecting.

That is not anti-fun. That is pro-future-fun. So yes, I still love the Fourth of July. I still love the hot dogs, the movies, the parades, the World Cup, the road trips, Target, and the fact that most people, despite everything, are still trying to build a life with each other.

Happy Fourth of July. Happy America 250.

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Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for your sudden, moving, suspiciously well-timed concern about the massive 40,000-acre gas-powered data center in Box Elder County. Thank you for bravely asking questions about a project after the public asked them first.

And most of all, thank you for showing us that when enough regular Utahns get mad, organized, loud, and impossible to ignore, even the most powerful people in this state can suddenly see the light.

Or at least see the polling.

Either way, it’s beautiful, really.

First, Thank You to Stuart Adams for Shrinking the Problem He Helped Make Full-Sized

Let us begin with Senate President Stuart Adams, who has now written a letter to Kevin O’Leary calling for the Stratos data center project to be shrunk by 75% and include more environmental protections, water stewardship, land conservation, heat capture, and public transparency.

Wow! A 75% reduction!

Bold. Visionary. Let’s look at this massive problem, and then what if, and hear me out on this, we just made it three-fourths smaller. Okay… We’re with you. We 75% support this plan.

And sure, some cynics might point out that President Adams is currently in a tough primary and may have recently discovered that Republican voters in Utah do, in fact, enjoy drinking water and breathing air more than they enjoy celebrity-backed infrastructure schemes at taxpayers’ expense.

Some cynics might also point out that the polling is coming in, and it is not exactly screaming “build the giant gas-powered robot pasture.” A Deseret News-Hinckley Institute poll found that 53% of Utah voters oppose the Stratos project, while only 30% support it. Even among Republicans, support was only 45%, with 36% opposed and about 1 in 5 unsure.

And some truly uncharitable people might note that President Adams personally chairs the MIDA board that approved 100% of this project before he became 75% concerned about it. And that he received $135,000 in donations from MIDA-connected donors. Funny how a tough primary can really sharpen a man’s political instincts.

But not us. No, no, we are choosing gratitude.

Thank you, President Adams, for standing up to Kevin O’Leary after the rest of Utah had already started standing up to Kevin O’Leary. Welcome to the China club, Mr. President. Oh, wait! Unlike us, you were already in it.

Thank You to Governor Cox for Making the Lake Great Again: Prayers Are Out, Hats Are In

We also owe a special thank you to Governor Spencer Cox, who held a press conference in a glorious “Make the Lake Great Again” hat.

The hat fit about as well as his sudden concern, and frankly, we expected better from someone with so much available hat real estate.

Also, why does everyone need a data center hat now? Kevin O’Leary had one. We made one. Now Spencer has one. We’re collecting these things like Infinity Stones, except instead of controlling the universe, they are a perfect prop for a media appearance.

At his press conference, Governor Cox said public feedback had been “incredibly helpful.” He said people are concerned about data centers, the lake, and resources, and that they should be concerned. He said he shares those concerns.

Wonderful! We are so grateful the Governor has changed his tune from “he’s tired of people being opposed to everything because they are destroying our country and it’s the dumbest thing ever” to thanking us! On behalf of the public, you’re so welcome, Governor.

He also issued an executive order directing state agencies to make sure data centers follow existing law. Which is great, because nothing says “bold executive action” like telling agencies to do the thing they were presumably already supposed to be doing. Were they not doing that already? Concerning, but let’s keep going.

To be fair, Cox did say there is a new piece: unused water must go to the Great Salt Lake. He also said the state may pursue additional data center guardrails in a special session, possibly in September.

And listen, we typically get nervous when Utah Republicans announce a special session. Historically, that phrase has meant “we found a new way to give ourselves more power and would like to do it before anyone can organize.” But in this case, the Governor floating a special session means public pressure is working. It means this project is no longer being treated as inevitable. It means they know the proposed plan is not enough to save them from political backlash.

So thank you, Governor Cox, for gifting us a good laugh and another top-tier Slack react with that hat, and for disagreeing better with a version of yourself that existed two weeks ago.

Thank You to Jason Chaffetz for Reminding Us He Still Exists

And then, of course, there is Jason Chaffetz. Welcome back, Jason! We thought we got rid of you, but like an STI in a retirement home, you always find a way back.

Without your involvement, this story would have continued to be deeply concerning. But with your involvement, we have completed our bingo card.

It was reported that Chaffetz helped connect Kevin O’Leary to the Stratos project and is reportedly being paid for it, though he will not say how much because of confidentiality agreements. Guess that Fox News contributor’s salary just wasn’t cutting it. He has also been publicly promoting the project, calling it good for jobs, national security, and the economy, while brushing off environmental concerns.

And because Utah politics was just begging for the return of the prodigal son, Chaffetz is reportedly eyeing a 2028 run for governor.

Thank you, Jason, for making this story somehow both more complicated and easier to understand. Thank you for demonstrating the difference between public service and business development. Thank you for showing Utahns that when political insiders say “national security,” sometimes they mean “please stop asking who is getting paid because it’s me!” And sometimes, it’s just fun for the public to know that multiple people eyeing the Republican nomination for Governor are financially tied to and incentivized by one of the most unpopular projects in Utah history.

Whew. Well, thanks, Jason. It’s soooooo great to have you back.

Thank You to Speaker Mike Schultz for Supporting Local Control for Two Whole Business Days

Next, we simply must thank our good friend House Speaker Mike Schultz.

Speaker Schultz came out in support of a citizen referendum on the Box Elder County data center project, saying studies need to be done, the public needs accurate information, and the community should be allowed to decide based on facts and good information.

Inspiring. A rare and beautiful sighting of “local control” in the wild.

And support for a referendum! How exciting. Granted, it is apparently much easier to support a referendum when it is not aimed directly at the Legislature, but still. Growth is growth.

We especially love local control when powerful state leaders remember it exists right before county attorneys explain that, actually, the locals may not get to control this one after all. Because in a truly elegant bit of Utah political choreography, Speaker Schultz backed the public’s right to weigh in, and then two days later, the Box Elder County Attorney’s Office rejected the referendum applications, determining that the county approvals were administrative actions, not laws voters could overturn.

But at least he got himself on the record!

And finally, thank you Speaker Schultz, for your brief but meaningful support of democracy during its limited engagement run. We understand it can be hard to champion transparency before everyone starts asking about your 25,000 acres of land surrounding the project, but hey! Welcome to the team.

A Real Thank You, Finally

Now let’s thank the people who actually deserve it.

First, the Box Elder Accountability Referendum group, or BEAR.

Box Elder residents are trying to put the county’s approval of the Stratos project on the ballot. But the Box Elder County Attorney’s Office rejected the referendum applications, determining that the county commission’s approvals were administrative actions, not legislative ones, and therefore not legally referable to voters.

Residents were told this project was a local matter. Then, residents tried to use a local democratic process. Then they were told the thing they wanted to vote on was not the kind of thing they were allowed to vote on. Funny how that works. The largest data center proposed in the United States just… doesn’t have a pathway for public accountability at all.

BEAR organizers say they are appealing the county’s rejection in court. Brenna Williams, the group’s lead liaison, said residents are furious and that the decision has only energized people more. According to Williams, around a thousand people had called asking when they could sign the petition. The group was preparing to collect more than 5,400 signatures if the referendum had been approved.

BEAR will need funds to help with the legal battle ahead to appeal the referendum. You can support BEAR here.

Finally, thank you to the public. A few weeks ago, this project was being sold as inevitable. Now…

• The Senate President wants the project reduced by 75%.

• The Speaker supports a referendum.

• The Governor issued an executive order.

• The Legislature’s Natural Resources Interim Committee voted to study the environmental impacts of data centers.

• A special session is being discussed.

• Box Elder residents are organizing and preparing legal action.

That did not happen because Utah’s Republican leaders woke up one morning with a burning passion for transparent governance, community input, and the Great Salt Lake.

It happened because people got loud. It happened because residents showed up. It happened because republicans and democrats and libertarians and unaffiliated and rural and urban and suburban and native communities came together. It happened because organizers organized, journalists reported, environmental advocates raised alarms, and regular Utahns refused to be treated like props in someone else’s economic development fantasy.

And that is as badass as it gets. That’s the Utah and the America we know and love.

So do not let the sudden concern tour fool you.

This is the moment when politicians try to soften the language, narrow the scope, quietly walk statements back, wait out the outrage, and hope everyone gets distracted by summer plans and whatever new scandal wanders out of the Utah Legislature.

Because if Utah politicians want praise for finally doing the bare minimum after weeks of pressure, fine. We are generous people. Thank you for your service.

Now go fix it.

We are not afraid to admit when we are wrong, and we were wrong in a genuinely impressive way.

In our piece yesterday about Speaker Mike Schultz’s land near the proposed Stratos data center in Box Elder County, we reported that a company he owns, Mike Shultz Inc., holds roughly 640 acres near the project boundary.

Thanks to a lot of you, we started looking more, and today it was confirmed by KSL, the correct number is more than 25,000 acres. Very good and fast work by Bridger Beal-Cvetko.

Anyway, yeah huge difference.

In our defense, a lot was happening. Kevin O’Leary was calling us Chinese spies on Fox News. The governor was getting testy with reporters at his monthly press conference. Box Elder residents were trying to understand how a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center moved this far without meaningful public input. MIDA was doing MIDA things. We had to learn a lot about water rights. And everyone was trying to process the water, air quality, tax breaks, land deals, and Great Salt Lake implications in like a period of 10 days.

We were distracted and forgot to check ownership records for all of his other companies. Our bad.

But we are so happy that the record was set straight.

And so today… we find ourselves in a tit for tat with both Kevin O’Leary AND Speaker Schultz. It’s been a weird week, y’all.

Now That’s What I Call Acreage!

KSL found that Schultz holds land through three separate entities. Mike Schultz Inc. owns the 640 acres we talked about yesterday, sitting a few miles from the smaller section of the Stratos Project on the other side of I-84. That deed was transferred in early January 2025. Sawmill Ranch LLC holds close to 1,300 acres about four miles from the largest swath of land in the project, with the North Promontory Mountains sitting in between. It also owns another 2,500 acres, 4.8 miles north of the northernmost portion, just above that 640 acres.

And then there is Keller Cattle Corp., which holds 23,575 acres, roughly ten miles from the project at its closest point, sitting several miles north of the Great Salt Lake’s Rozel Bay. Most of that land was purchased in 2022.

Yellow is Schultz’s property, Purple is Senator Scott Sandall’s land. Red is the proposed Stratos site.

So to recap: three companies, four tranches of land, acquired across three separate years, totaling more than 25,000 acres in the broader area around the largest proposed development in state history.

His conflict of interest disclosure does list all three LLCs, but the property in question is not disclosed. As we covered yesterday, Utah law requires legislators to disclose the entity. It does not require them to tell you what is inside it. The optional section where legislators can voluntarily identify real property that might create a conflict of interest has been left blank on Schultz’s disclosure every year it has been on file.

Schultz told KSL he is currently in the process of swapping the Mike Schultz Inc. parcels with another farmer, a deal that has not yet closed, which would give him comparable land near property he already owns by the Utah-Idaho border. He said the land is not developable, that nobody has contacted him about selling, and that nobody ever will, because the terrain makes it unsuitable. He said he was blindsided by the project and learned it was serious in early April.

Even if every defense is true, the larger issue remains: Utahns did not have a clear view of the land, the power, or the process.

Speaker Schultz Has Some Thoughts

Today, Speaker Schultz posted on Instagram. He also gave interviews to KSL and ABC4. Let’s go through it.

First, a quick scene-setter. He is a multimillionaire, the Speaker of the Utah House, and the most powerful legislator in a supermajority state. We are, according to the internet this week, “2 local girls.” Keep that in mind as we walk through his very measured response to our questions.

“People don’t want facts to prevail.”

Correct. We had 640 acres. The fact KSL found was 25,000. We love facts. Facts are why this story got bigger, not smaller. Please, more facts!

The land is “not developable.” It’s “extremely hilly.” Access is limited. You need four-wheel drive when it rains.

We appreciate the scenic tour. Truly. But “my specific parcel is hilly” is a somewhat narrow response to questions now about 25,000 acres across many parcels. Land does not have to sit under a server rack to appreciate near a massive development. Roads get built. Utilities get extended. Workers need housing, gas, food, and somewhere to stop for coffee. It is a proposed 40,000-acre industrial campus, larger than Washington D.C., twice the size of Manhattan, visible from space according to some estimates. The question was never “can a tractor get there?” Schultz also told KSL he has no plans to sell any of it, and it will stay ranch land. That is nice to say. We note that he said it.

It’s a 25-minute drive. Here’s my Apple Maps screenshot.

A 25-minute drive is a Costco run. It is shorter than most rural Utahns’ commutes every day. So with all due respect, Speaker, maybe ease up on the defensive driving. The screenshot explains a route. It does not explain the timeline, the disclosure gaps, or why Utahns had to dig through county records to understand the full land picture.

And now we are going to need significantly more screenshots to cover the tour of the other 24,000 acres.

“I first heard rumors in February and didn’t receive meaningful details until April.”

Kevin O’Leary went on national television and said he met with Schultz, Cox, and Adams about this project in late 2025. Schultz says he was not in that meeting. Both things cannot be true. And we aren’t in a position to resolve that. We would also add a genuinely curious follow-up question for the Speaker: even if Schultz was not in that meeting, did the governor or Senate President Adams not mention to him afterward that they had just discussed a 40,000-acre data center, especially in a county where Schultz owns 25,000 acres? That seems like the kind of thing that would come up in conversation. But we are not in a position to answer that either.

“I have no authority over the project or its approval process.”

The Speaker of the Utah House leads the chamber that created MIDA, funds state agencies, writes disclosure law, and decides what legislation lives and dies. He also is, as we know now, a large land owner in the area. The county vote is one step in a much longer chain, and he is one of the most powerful people holding that chain. “I did not personally cast that vote” is not the same as “there is nothing here worth scrutinizing.” Especially since O’Leary said, in that same meeting, that he was told by Cox, Adams, and Schultz that they had 40,000 for him already.

Our findings were “ridiculous” and “nonsense.”

Within 24 hours of us being ridiculous, KSL independently reviewed property records and found 25,000 acres. So there’s that.

Doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous now, does it? But the questions from yesterday remain: when did he know, when did he realize his land was nearby, and why did Utahns have to dig through county records to find any of this? We would add: would he support strengthening Utah’s disclosure laws so that legislators cannot hold 25,000 acres through holding companies and LLCs without the public knowing? Or the actual purchase price of properties?

He can call us ridiculous. We have been called worse by many men, and most recently, at least one flip-flip wearing billionaire.

“People would rather use social media to stoke the fires of hate and controversy for clicks and exposure.”

A few things.

We did not choose to be on Fox News. Kevin O’Leary put us there. He went on national television and called us a Chinese Communist Party cell, and we had zero input on that decision. If we were optimizing for exposure, we would have picked a more flattering entry point than being accused of foreign sedition while the chyron identified our accuser as “Mr. Wonderful.”

The attention on the Stratos Project is important. We are glad more Utahns know what is happening. But if we are being honest, we wish the spotlight were not on us. The people who should be getting it are the Box Elder County residents who showed up to that commission meeting and got steamrolled anyway. The scientists doing real work on what this project means for the air and the Great Salt Lake. The journalists spending hours in records requests and MIDA documents. The local organizers gathering referendum signatures before anyone with power seemed interested in listening. Those people were doing the hard work before Kevin O’Leary did his research into our “IP addresses.”

Exposure is something. Power is more. Money is more. Access is more. The people pushing this project had all three long before the public knew the project existed. They had private meetings, development authority, tax structures, lawyers, lobbyists, and a multimillionaire with a television show. We had public records, a few tips, and a deeply unfortunate willingness to be awake at 1 a.m. looking at parcel maps.

We have been clear about our goals since we started. We are not journalists and we are definitely not neutral. We aren’t scientists or land use experts. We also aren’t elected officials. We exist to eliminate single-party control in Utah and make this state better for the people who actually live here. We are a small group that runs on subscriptions and the belief that Utah can be better for everyone if people pay attention.

We – and we cannot emphasize this enough – did not get into this for the exposure. Who would have ever predicted politics in Utah could be this interesting? We talk about issues that matter to people. We try to make complicated, boring, intentionally confusing political stuff easier to understand, more fun to follow, and harder for powerful people to bury. We got into this because the alternative is a Utah where massive projects move quietly, land holdings stay functionally hidden, insiders get the first look, and regular people find out after the important decisions have already been made.

That is a state we are trying to change.

Speaker Schultz can call that clicks and exposure if he wants. We call it the mission.

With Friends Like Kevin…

It is worth taking a moment to appreciate the communications strategy from the pro-Stratos side, because truly, what a gift.

When their primary spokesperson is Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian reality TV personality went on Fox news and accused two Utah organizations opposing the project, including ours, and being funded by the Chinese government, a normal person might have responded to local concerns about water and air quality with something like “we want to work with the community.” Kevin went with: foreign agents. Bold choice for a foreigner.

And then, in one of the stranger plot twists of this entire saga, O’Leary sat down with Tucker Carlson and got absolutely cooked over tax incentives, the bypassed public referendum, and who actually benefits from a project like this.

When Carlson pressed O’Leary on why Utah taxpayers should subsidize a project whose tenants are some of the richest companies in the world, O’Leary said he is just “a football player on the field of capitalism” playing by the rules. When pushed on the fact that residents tried to stop it and got dismissed, O’Leary argued that elected officials signing off was good enough. When asked to justify the subsidies against only 2,000 permanent jobs, O’Leary said AI will create millions of jobs but acknowledged he cannot say what any of them will be.

Tucker Carlson, for his part, said Utah taxpayers “had no choice” and that Spencer Cox “really is a kind of living symbol of our ruling class.”

We hate it when the worst person you know makes a good point. But here we are. And if the coalition asking for transparency now stretches from Box Elder residents to scientists to journalists to, somehow, Tucker Carlson, then maybe this project has a bigger credibility problem than Kevin O’Leary wants to admit.

Well, Well, Well, If It Isn’t Public Pressure

This is working. Like you guys, for real.

A few weeks ago, Gov. Cox was at a podium saying, “I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever.” Then the public pushed back. Cox said those remarks “did not meet the expectations I have for myself,” directed the DEQ to review all air permits and follow applicable federal law, required the Department of Natural Resources to mandate the most environmentally sensitive cooling technology available, and required the developer to publish a public water plan showing no degradation to the Great Salt Lake.

That is a significant walk from “taking time is the dumbest thing ever” and “we’ve let the people who are against everything ruin our country.”

And Speaker Schultz, who today called our questions “political theater,” “nonsense,” and “ridiculous,” also said in that same Instagram post that he has called for detailed studies on water, air quality, and infrastructure impacts, and fully expects those questions to be taken seriously.

Great! Those are the questions people have been asking for weeks. We are glad to have you on the team!

We are not going to pretend that politicians calling for studies they could legislate into existence is accountability. But a month ago, none of this was being engaged publicly at all. Residents were being told the process was done. The governor was saying deliberation was stupid. A Canadian multi-millionaire was ready to cash in on the tax breaks.

Now Cox has walked it back, Schultz says he wants environmental review, Tucker Carlson is on our side, we think, we are still not fully sure how to feel about that. And Kevin O’Leary is still… being an idiot on national tv.

All this to say. It’s working. And that credit goes to you.

You showed up to the meetings. You filed the records requests. You dug through parcel maps and sent us tips at midnight. You made enough noise that powerful people had to start answering questions they were hoping no one would ask.

The whole architecture of how this project moved was designed to get past the finish line before anyone could organize a real response. It did not work this time.

This is going to be a really long process. But whatever comes next, what you have already done moved people, changed the conversation, and proved again that public pressure in Utah is real.

Ridiculous is working.

And to be clear – and we cannot emphasize this enough – it was absurd. But it was also useful.

Not because Kevin had a point, because he absolutely did not. But his accusation showed exactly how powerful people respond when normal questions start getting just a little too close to home.

The powerful politicians and billionaires don’t answer the questions; they attack the people asking them. Kevin didn’t explain the water, the power, the impacts on the Great Salt Lake, the tax breaks, or why local residents were kept in the dark until the Stratos Project was already moving. Instead, he tried to turn public scrutiny into a foreign conspiracy.

So naturally, instead of backing off after threats and doxxing, we locked in. Partly because if a billionaire wants to lie about us on national television, the least we can do is sell a hat about it.

But also because when someone tries that hard to make the story about something as far away as China, it is worth asking what they do not want people looking at here in Utah. So we started looking.

And the records obtained exclusively by Elevate Utah do not point to China.

What we found is something considerably more familiar in Utah politics: a process so weak, opaque, and legally manipulated that the public can be told nearly nothing (and only at the “11th hour”) and still be expected to thank their elected officials for their “transparency.”

Before Stratos was a controversy, before residents could object, before the process became public in any meaningful way, several of Utah’s most powerful insiders appear to have already been positioned around it. And by that we mean, not politically. Not coincidentally. Already holding the land. Already writing the laws.

One of them was the Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives.

Much A Deed About Nothing

So when you can’t sleep, naturally, you start digging through public records. That’s normal, right? Everyone does that? Cool. Anyway.

With the help of a classic Utah backcountry skier and public lands enthusiast, we were looking at land ownership around the proposed 40,000-acre Stratos data center project in Box Elder County.

And that is when we saw it. A very neat little square of land, sitting about three miles from the northernmost boundary of the proposed Stratos Project corridor, near the I-84 interchange at Hansel Valley Road.

The owner is listed under a company name: Mike Schultz Inc.

Now, despite the very subtle name, Mike Schultz Inc. is in fact owned by Mike Schultz, Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives.

So we did what any normal, well-adjusted person would do after seeing the Speaker’s company listed on land near the largest proposed development in the state. We pulled the deed.

As someone who does not own a house and, based on current housing prices, may have to continue to settle for recreational Zillow scrolling, we were delighted to learn that deeds are also public records, purchasable from the Box Elder County Recorder for the low, low price of $1.50.

This deed was filed in the Box Elder County Recorder’s Office on January 3, 2025. It shows the Lyle Holdaway Family Trust transferring two parcels in western Box Elder County to Mike Schultz Inc. The parcels total roughly 640 acres.

And the recorded consideration on the deed?

Ten dollars.

Ten.

Yeah.

But let’s be precise here, because we think precision matters when powerful men are calling you a foreign agent on national television.

The TEN DOLLARS does not necessarily mean Schultz bought 640 acres for ten dollars. In Utah, deeds are required to state some form of consideration to be legally valid, but the actual purchase price does not have to appear in the public record. A nominal figure, commonly “$10 and other good and valuable consideration,” (like this deed states) satisfies that requirement while keeping the real terms of the transaction private.

So we are not saying the Speaker bought 640 acres for less than most millennial Utahns now pay to apply for an apartment they will never get. We are saying his company received the land, and the public record does not tell us what, if anything, he paid for it.

And he purchased this land approximately 13 months before Box Elder County Commissioners even said they were hearing “rumors” of the data center deals with landowners.

Schultz told the Deseret News this week that he was “not made aware of” the Stratos Project “until just a little over 30 days ago.”

Kevin O’Leary, for his part, told Fox and Friends on April 27 that he had met with Governor Cox, Speaker Schultz, and Senate President Stuart Adams in late 2025 about the project. Schultz told the Deseret News that “Yeah, I wasn’t a part of that” and that O’Leary had reached out, but his schedule was too busy.

We are not in a position to resolve that particular disagreement. We will simply note that by the time that meeting allegedly did or did not happen, Schultz’s company had already been sitting on those 640 acres for the better part of a year.

Which is quite, to use a technical term, a coincidence.

Not Exactly His First Rodeo

Now, if this were just some random guy with a square of land in Box Elder County, this would still be worth noting. (And believe us, we are looking into all of the rest of the parcels. Just give us a minute. It’s been a long week.)

But alas! Mike Schultz is not some random guy.

He is the Speaker of the Utah House. He is also not exactly new to land development, construction, or the sacred Utah art of turning dirt into money.

Schultz founded Castle Creek Homes in 1995, a homebuilding company that today operates “from Davis County to the northern reaches of Box Elder County.”

He got his contractor’s license at 20, became a millionaire in his 20s, and his most recent conflict of interest disclosure lists 25 business entities he owns or receives income from, including real estate, apartment complexes, hotels, a lending company, construction companies, and a private plane through CCH Aviation LLC. KSL reported that he doesn’t disclose his net worth and doesn’t love talking about it.

It started, for what it’s worth, according to him, with worms. At age 10, he said he had a sign in his front yard: “Worms, $1.99 a dozen.” By 16, he was hauling hay and roofing houses. By 20, he had his contractor’s license and was building homes, and quickly turned that into millions and a private plane. So this is a man who has spent thirty years watching raw land turn into money when the conditions are right, and who sponsored more construction and real estate-related legislation than any other Utah lawmaker from 2016 - 2019.

So yes, he may now describe himself on his official disclosure as a “farmer and rancher.” And sure, the expensive belt buckles are doing a lot of work.

But, a man with thirty years of residential development experience, operating across the exact counties where this project is proposed, is not the kind of person who looks at 640 acres near a freeway interchange, a natural gas pipeline corridor, and the largest proposed development in state history and needs someone to explain land appreciation to him.

We are not saying he knew or alleging that he did anything illegal. We are saying that if anyone were professionally equipped to recognize what that land could become, it is someone like him. What he knew, and when, are questions the public record cannot currently answer, but we would encourage those questions to be asked.

Which brings us back to those 640 acres.

Location, Location, Legislation

As mentioned, on a previous appearance on Fox and Friends, Kevin O’Leary said he met with Governor Cox, President Stuart Adams, and Speaker Mike Schultz in late 2025. O’Leary said, “I’ve got the team. I can raise the capital. Do you have the land?’ And they said, ’40,000 acres.’”

But these 640 acres owned by Mike Schultz Inc. are not floating somewhere in the great sagebrush beyond. It sits roughly three miles from the proposed Stratos corridor, near the I-84 freeway interchange at Hansel Valley Road.

That northernmost parcel of the Stratos Project has not been designated for data center operations. Box Elder County has said it could be used for manufacturing, retail, restaurants, hotels, and public works infrastructure. Which is, coincidentally, exactly the kind of development a residential and commercial builder might know something about.

A Brookings Institute report published this year found that rural communities across the country are increasingly facing “high-pressure decisions regarding land use, fiscal policy, workforce development, and resource management” — often before local leaders have the staffing, expertise, or plans in place to respond. The report noted that confidentiality agreements between developers and local officials can “make residents feel blindsided and at a disadvantage.” The Salt Lake Tribune reported that at least one Stratos landowner told them they were already bound by a nondisclosure agreement barring them from discussing the deal’s details.

According to LandApp, a real estate data platform tracking data center development, rural properties near major transport routes and power infrastructure have become “prime real estate for data center developers, who are often willing to pay premium prices for land that meets their specific criteria.” Properties that may have been overlooked for traditional development — like, say, ranch land near a freeway interchange — can carry significant untapped value once a hyperscale campus is announced nearby. Sometimes 2-4x agricultural land values.

The numbers from the country’s most mature data center corridor illustrate the trajectory. CBRE has documented that data center land value per parcel in Loudoun County, Virginia, now runs sixteen times higher than the next highest land use. Data centers make up 26% of the county’s entire real estate tax base. Earlier this year, one developer was offering landowners $4.4 million per acre for residential properties near existing data center zones. Now, we know, Loudoun County is not Box Elder County, and a rural Utah corridor is not Northern Virginia. But it is the documented pattern of what happens to land values when hyperscale development takes root.

That pattern is also why the construction phase matters, not just the operational one. A 2026 Construction Dive analysis noted that a significant share of data center-related work is “occurring around the data center rather than within the building footprint” — roads, utilities, power lines, logistics infrastructure, all of it requiring staging, access, and land near the build.

West GenCo co-founder Austin Pritchett told residents at the Box Elder county hearing that each gigawatt of the project equates to roughly 1,000 jobs. According to JLL, for every direct job inside a data center, roughly three to four additional jobs are created in the surrounding local economy. Phase 1 alone is 3,000 gigawatts. And all those workers need somewhere to live, eat, fuel up, and stop for coffee.

Schultz is not the only Utah elected official who appears to be holding land in that position. Senator Scott Sandall — who represents Senate District 1, which covers Box Elder County, and who sponsored SB132, the 2025 bill that created the specific legal framework that made Stratos possible — has his Sandall Farm & Ranch Family Partnership listed roughly 4 miles away from the proposed site. ABC4 reported that when Sandall was asked whether anyone had approached him about selling, he said he had not been contacted — but that he would not be opposed to it, for the right price.

View an interactive (very roughly made by Jackie and not 100% accurate) map of the Stratos Project Area and Schultz and Sandall’s property ownership here.

Turning your land from a real farm to a server farm is one of the most direct ways a landowner in this position can benefit. Some landowners inside the project zone may sell directly to the developer. And MIDA documents indicate that 100% of the landowners must consent to their land being included. But others sitting adjacent may find that the project turns their land into something considerably more valuable than ranch land without ever selling an acre.

Now, maybe nothing happens with Schultz’s 640 acres, or with Sandall’s ranch, or with any of it. Maybe it all stays exactly as it is. Maybe this is all perfectly above board.

But if that is true, Utahns should not have to take it on faith. They should be able to see it clearly. And that is where the disclosure system was supposed to help.

Please Enjoy This Very Transparent Black Box

Here is how Utah’s public disclosure system is supposed to work: legislators file annual conflict of interest forms so Utahns can see where private interests and public power might overlap. The idea is to make potential conflicts visible before decisions are made, not after everyone has already signed off and gone home.

One of Schultz’s disclosed entities is Mike Schultz Inc. Its listed description on his conflict of interest form is two words: ”Holding Company”.

That’s it. No descriptions. No details. No parcels. No Box Elder County. No 640 acres. No deed recorded four days before the form was filed. Just: “Holding Company”.

And under Utah law, which Republicans have created, this is completely legal. And this is precisely the problem.

A holding company is a legal wrapper. It can hold land, buildings, investments, other companies, or any combination of the above. Utah law requires legislators to disclose the wrapper. It does not require them to tell you what is inside the wrapper. There is an optional section, Item 6A, where legislators can voluntarily identify real property they believe may create a conflict of interest. Schultz has left that section blank every year he has a conflict of interest disclosure on record.

A 2024 investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project found that Schultz had four real estate entities missing from his disclosure entirely and only added them after a reporter inquired. The Legislature’s explanation was that the oversight occurred because he “no longer oversees the day-to-day operations.” Even with those corrections, the law still does not require him to tell the public what those entities own.

So when Mike Schultz Inc. received those Box Elder County parcels on January 3, 2025, here is what the disclosure system produced: NOTHING. Four days later, on January 7, Schultz filed his annual form. Mike Schultz Inc. was listed without any details. Same as before.

Paging Mr. Wonderful’s Audit Team

Kevin O’Leary wanted a forensic audit. And, honestly, now, same.

An audit of the timing of these meetings, the deeds, the 10 dollars, the holding companies, the disclosure forms that have said “Holding Company” for years, while the land inside them went undisclosed. An audit of the gap between when powerful Utahns appear to have been positioned around a massive development deal, changed the law, and when the rest of Utah was allowed to find out about it.

We are not Chinese operatives. We are Utahns who think you should be able to see whose names are on the land and who stands to benefit before the concrete gets poured — and who think that figuring this out should not require a backcountry skier, a Box Elder County Recorder login, and several nights of not sleeping.

So yes, Kevin. Please open the books.

Apparently, we have reached the part of the Stratos data center story where Kevin O’Leary, noted Canadian television billionaire and man who appears to own both a private jet and a life-size cardboard cutout of himself, went on Fox News and accused us of operating as Chinese Communist Party proxies inside Utah.

Normal Monday.

Kevin told Fox News that his “guys” had done a “deep dig into the IP addresses” and found “two cells inside of Utah”: Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies. More specifically, Gabi Finlayson.

He said he was doing it to give us a chance to defend ourselves! How kind of you to make an insane and false accusation on national television and then give us a chance to respond from our much smaller platform! How kind!

So, because we are such good subservient women who are happy to take orders from a bald billionaire, here is our response.

An Open Letter to Mr. Wonderful, From the Alleged Utah Cell

Dear Mr. “Wonderful”,

First of all, thank you for the promotion. Truly. We always wondered what it would take to get a billionaire to say our names on national television, and apparently, the answer is: ask basic questions about a data center.

So let’s start with the big one.

You accused Gabi and Elevate of being a “cell” operating inside Utah on behalf of… wait for it… the Chinese government.

A cell.

Our immediate reaction was something along the lines of: hahahahahahahahaha, what the hell are you talking about? Are you good? Did someone check on Kevin? Is there a responsible adult nearby?

But after sitting with it, we have decided to take the compliment.

Rude, yes. Insane, absolutely. But biologically flattering. We have been called a lot of things in Utah politics, but “cell” is genuinely new. And sure, if we’re talking mitochondria, yes, we are a powerhouse of a cell. Thank you for noticing.

He said, “Gabi, what are you doing?”

That does raise an important follow-up question: Kevin. What are you doing?

Because Gabi is mostly making videos, reading public records, writing newsletters, drinking too much Diet Coke, and trying to figure out why a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center that could consume more than double Utah’s current energy usage got shoved through in less than two weeks despite thousands of Utahns raising alarms.

Terrifying stuff. She has Canva Pro, a tripod, and the mouth of a sailor.

Officers, this way! Lock her up.

“Who’s paying you?”

Uhhh, nobody. That is the whole thing.

Sure, our company runs campaigns, and people pay us for campaign expertise. We’re lucky we love what we do, but we all have to have a job. You should know that, considering your job is telling small business owners that their dreams are stupid, defending Trump, and ruining the environments of places you don’t live in. But if we were in the business of making money, we would not be running Democratic campaigns in a red state like Utah. Wouldn’t change it, but it’s not exactly a cash cow – we’d think you would understand that, given, you know, markets and investments and the nightmare that is late stage capitalism and consumerism that gave you all of your money!

However, we do want you to know that when Gabi went to American Fork High School — that’s in Utah, not China, Kevin — she had to take a financial literacy class taught by the high school wrestling coach and terrible member of the Utah State Board of Education, Cole Kelley. In that financial literacy class, essentially the only thing they did was play Monopoly and watch reruns of Shark Tank. So you really only have yourself to blame for this nemesis you’ve created, keeping in mind she was literally in high school while you were already past your prime, whatever that prime once was. Anyway, we digress.

Do our jobs have anything to do with what we post on social media? No. No one pays us to post on social media. No one pays us to publish on Substack. No one is secretly wiring us foreign intelligence money to ask obvious questions about a massive industrial project that could reshape Utah’s land, energy grid, air quality, water future, carbon emissions, and political corruption profile.

Who actually funds this work? Utahns. Small-dollar donors. Paid Substack subscribers. People who care enough about this state to throw us $6 a month so we can keep doing the deeply glamorous work of reading MIDA documents and Utah code until our eyes start twitching.

There is no secret benefactor. There is no shadowy foreign government. There is not even a lot of small-dollar donor money here. There is, however, a truly haunting amount of credit card debt.

If we are Chinese operatives, we are catastrophically bad at it. Someone please tell Beijing the payment portal for our American Express bills appears to be broken.

“Who would want to stop building our electrical grid? There’s only one. China.”

Kevin showed up to make this argument wearing a hat that says “Utah National Security.”

We want to be very clear that this is a real hat that a real adult man wore on purpose on national television while accusing us of espionage. Just out of frame on Fox News was a surprisingly short lifesize cardboard cutout of himself. Because, as the saying goes, behind every terrible man is a shorter cardboard cutout of that same man.

Kevin is very worried about Utah’s security. We are, too, actually. Just a different kind. We are worried about the Great Salt Lake. We are worried about water. We are worried about air quality, carbon emissions, land deals, and what it means for northern Utah when a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center moves in and doubles the state’s energy consumption. We are worried about a public process that kept Utahns in the dark until the powerful people were already positioned.

So, naturally, we had to make our own hat.

It says “Utah Nature Security.” You can pre-order one here. Proceeds support the work that apparently has a billionaire nervous enough to go on Fox News and call us, and Alliance for a Better Utah, Chinese Communist Party assets.

Kevin has his hat. Now we can have ours.

PS - Kevin, we’ll use our billions of Yuan to gift one to you.

Join Our Utah Nature Security Cell

“Let’s show the people of Utah you actually care about them.”

Now, hey there. We do not need Kevin O’Leary to teach us how to care about Utah.

For the official record. We were born here. We live here. Our families are here. Our friends are here. Our future is here. We have not, and never have been affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (insane we just wrote that sentence). We sacrificed other jobs, other futures, other opportunities, and our mental well-being at times because we actually give a fuck about this state. We love this state and the people who make it so amazing. We have spent years doing underpaid and unpaid work explaining what is happening in this state because Utahns deserve to know who is making decisions for them, who is profiting, and who gets left holding the bag when the powerful men are done congratulating each other.

You, Kevin, flew in to invest in a data center. But do not come into our state, threaten our land, insult our intelligence, accuse local women of being foreign agents, and then demand we prove we care about Utah.

We have been proving it for years. Without a billionaire’s budget. Without Fox News. Without a life-size cardboard cutout of ourselves, although honestly…….. now we’re considering it.

So yes, Kevin, we are going after the leadership.

You said that like it was a scandal. It is not.

You’re so unoriginal – we’ve heard this from powerful, corrupt men before, and we’re damn proud of it. We are absolutely going after the people who helped push this project through. We are going after the corruption that led to this, and so much more. We are going after the process that kept Utahns in the dark. We are going after the land deals, the political relationships, the money, and the very convenient timing of it all. And we’re going to keep doing it, with this project and many more.

No amount of billionaire tantrum theater on Fox News is going to change that. Because unlike you, we care about this state! We’ve been here before you dropped in to ruin it and we’ll be here long after you lose interest.

There is a saying that you should never accept criticism from someone you don’t respect. We are definitely not accepting the criticism of someone who wears a suit and flip flops on national television and then posts a POV just to call attention to it. Put your dogs away, bro.

So with all due respect, which is none, get the hell out of our state.

So here is our official statement in response:

HAHAHAHA. You cannot be serious. Take your lies, your data center, and your toes back to the cartoon villain lair you came from, Kevin. The only foreign actor here is the Canadian billionaire pretending he cares about Utah more than the people who live here.

And you can quote us on that. Or anything in this Substack.

Come out, come out, Kevin!

We’ll be here.

Small towns. Family farms. Hay bales. A tractor in soft lighting. A wholesome Ballerina-Farm-fantasy where everyone has sourdough starter, pioneer grit, and no inconvenient questions about water rights. Maybe a child running through Cox’s alfalfa fields while someone off-camera whispers, “Yes, perfect, now look more values-based.” The campaign-ad Americana that never really existed in the first place.

That rural Utah is really useful for politicians. That’s Spencer Cox’s Utah.

But then there’s the Utah that got handed a data center. You know, the one with actual wells, actual lungs, actual bills, actual farms, actual kids, and actual consequences. The one that has to live downstream from decisions made by people who call it “economic development” when what they really mean is “we already made the deal, so let’s all just disagree better now.”

This week, more than a thousand people packed the Box Elder County Fairgrounds after learning that a 40,000-acre natural gas data center — bigger than Manhattan, powered by a private gas pipeline, and sitting directly on the Great Salt Lake watershed — had already been approved and just needed to be rubber-stamped by the Box Elder County commission.

The commissioners voted yes, then fled through a side door.

And just like that, rural Utah went from sacred political symbol to inconvenient obstacle. Funny how fast that happens.

Meet the 40,000-Acre, Gas-Powered Elephant

The Stratos Project is a proposed 40,000-acre hyperscale data center campus in unincorporated Box Elder County — on land that is part of the ancestral territory of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. The project is backed by Kevin O’Leary — Shark Tank‘s “Mr. Wonderful”: investor in cat DNA testing and wine for dogs, recent Timothée Chalamet co-star, and whose personal brand is asking entrepreneurs on TV why they haven’t monetized their own grandmother yet. He is now the man who wants to permanently reshape northern Utah’s water and energy landscape. Diversified portfolio, Kev.

At full buildout, Stratos would generate 9 gigawatts of power. Utah – the entire state of Utah – currently uses about 4. Very casual. Very “just popping by with a few servers and the power demands of a small nation.”

It would run entirely off the public grid, powered by natural gas — meaning one private development would more than double the state’s entire energy footprint. According to University of Utah atmospheric sciences professor Kevin Perry, that’s a 50% increase in Utah’s carbon emissions.

It sits directly on the Great Salt Lake watershed — you already know, the lake that has already lost roughly half its surface area, whose exposed lakebed releases toxic dust into the air people breathe, and toward which Utah has directed a billion dollars in restoration funding that still hasn’t been enough.

The MIDA Touch

Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) is a state agency created to support economic development around military bases. Very official and acronym-y. The kind of thing you assume exists for reasons involving spreadsheets, land use, and some guy probably named Brad.

But MIDA is not some sleepy little board that meets quarterly to discuss parking lots near Hill Air Force Base.

Its board is appointed, not elected. The governor appoints five members (even though he said he “thought” he only appointed one), and the Senate president and the Speaker of the House each appoints one board member. And the Senate president (more on him later) currently chairs the same board he helps appoint.

Cozy little setup, no?

MIDA can issue bonds, approve development agreements, offer tax incentives, and steer hundreds of millions in public financing into private projects, all without a single public vote. It wields enormous power and operates with limited public accountability, which makes it very useful if you’re trying to move quickly on something that might not survive public scrutiny.

On April 24, MIDA’s board approved the Stratos Project. They granted O’Leary Digital a 92% cut on the standard energy use tax — from 6% down to 0.5% — and structured the property taxes so that 80% flows back to the developer. The public upside MIDA touts is $30 million a year for Box Elder County and hundreds of jobs once the project is running. The private upside is considerably larger, and it goes to a Canadian TV personality billionaire, whose job, until recently, was telling cupcake companies they were overvalued.

Meanwhile, the Box Elder County commissioners — who had to sign off for the project to proceed — said they first heard about it through “rumors” during the last legislative session. They were then given days to decide on a multi-billion-dollar project affecting the Great Salt Lake watershed.

But that didn’t slow down our cowboy-hat-wearing commissioners! They heard “rumors,” received “days,” saw “massive irreversible industrial development,” and said, “Well, saddle up.”

No shade to cowboys or their hats. Tremendous shade to whatever the hell this process was.

At the commission meeting on May 4, Commissioner Lee Perry (middle cowboy) said that the decision had “nothing to do with water or air quality” because those issues are handled at the state level.

Huh. A vote on a 40,000-acre natural gas facility on the Great Salt Lake watershed that would massively increase carbon emissions had nothing to do with water or air quality?? Those, apparently, are someone else’s problem. The commissioners were just there to hold the door open. And then, fittingly, left the meeting through a side door.

Farmers, Doctors, Professors, and Other Alleged Agitators

In the ten days between when this project became public and when the final vote happened, Utah did what Utah does when it pays attention: it showed up.

Eighty people packed the first meeting on almost no notice. By the second meeting, 1,100 had filled the Box Elder County fairgrounds after rallying outside. Over 3,700 formal protests have been filed with the Utah Division of Water Rights, which cost $15 each. Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment stood on the Capitol steps and called the approval process “highly suspicious.” Native American activist Darren Parry compared it to the Nevada nuclear tests: decisions made by a small group, consequences borne by everyone else, for generations.

Scientists have been equally clear. MIDA claimed the 3-gigawatt first phase would use just 24 acre-feet of water. USU physics professor Robert Davies ran the numbers and found that it would make Stratos 97% more water-efficient than the most efficient gas plant in the United States. So, either the laws of thermodynamics have been quietly repealed somewhere between Shark Tank tapings, or someone isn’t being straight. Another USU professor, Patrick Belmont, said the project would wipe out every restoration gain Utah has made on the Great Salt Lake.

There is no completed environmental impact analysis. The project was approved before it was required. The commissioners voted and said the environmental review would happen later, at some point, but they weren’t sure when.

Kevin O’Leary responded with the subtlety and emotional intelligence of a man who has spent years telling small business owners their dreams are stupid on national television. He posted a video claiming 90% of protesters were paid out-of-state agitators being bused in. He provided no evidence unless “trust me, I’m rich” counts as a source now, which, in economic development circles, it sometimes appears to.

He also claimed the facility would be powered partly by “solar, wind, and batteries.” It is powered entirely by natural gas. This location was chosen because of its proximity to natural gas pipelines. He added that he is “the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies,” which is an incredible sentence because it manages to be both irrelevant and smug, the Shark Tank house blend.

Two false claims and one impressive non sequitur, from the man who received a 92% tax discount from the state of Utah. Mr. Wonderful, indeed.

Old MacCox Had a Farm, E-I-E-I-Oops

Alleged alfalfa farmer and confirmed Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, kicked off his April 30 press conference acknowledging that 100% of Utah is in drought, 59% of it extreme, and that the Great Salt Lake is still not recovering fast enough. Then he called the scientists and residents raising concerns about a natural gas facility on the Great Salt Lake watershed, “people operating off of models and technologies that have changed drastically,” and dismissed their concerns as “disinformation.”

He also said this:

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore. And those days are over.”

The people he was describing drove many miles on a work night to a fairground in Tremonton. They were farmers, ranchers, doctors, professors, parents, and everyday Utahns. They are not against everything. They are against this specific thing, for specific documented reasons, and the governor of Utah called them a threat to the country.

So why, you might ask, is the Governor throwing a temper tantrum over a project he has no say over? So glad you asked.

Originally reported by the Salt Lake Tribune in 2024, Cox’s family founded and ran CentraCom, a telecommunications company based in Fairview, for generations. He served as VP and general counsel there before entering politics in 2013. The company was sold to LICT Corporation in 2001, but family members, including his father and cousin, have continued to manage it. Since Cox entered politics, CentraCom has expanded its fiber network from roughly 900 miles to over 2,400 miles, becoming the second-largest fiber network in the state. The Tribune reported that CentraCom’s growth has tracked closely with Cox’s political rise.

CentraCom has already connected Utah’s major data centers to its fiber network. MIDA’s own executive director cited the Stratos site’s “redundant fiber availability” as a key selling point for the location. Hyperscale data centers don’t just need power and water. They need fiber — lots of it. Simultaneously, CentraCom has been actively expanding its rural fiber footprint across Utah, including in the kinds of remote rural areas where projects like Stratos get built.

To be extremely, legally, please-do-not-send-us-a-letter clear: we are not claiming a conspiracy, illegality, or even a contract exists between CentraCom and Stratos. None has been announced.

We are saying that when the governor’s family-linked telecommunications company is structurally positioned to potentially, maybe benefit from the kind of rural fiber infrastructure a project like this needs, and the governor is also out here scolding actual rural Utahns for asking questions about the project, it is fair to raise an eyebrow. Maybe even both eyebrows.

This is the problem with Spencer Cox’s rural Utah brand. It works beautifully as long as rural Utah stays symbolic.

Rural Utah as origin story? Perfect.
Rural Utah as campaign backdrop? Gorgeous.
Rural Utah as proof that he understands “real people”? Ugh, yes. Put it in the ad. Get the rope and those brand new work gloves for Spenc, stat!

Rural Utah as actual people with water rights, land, lungs, questions, and the audacity to disagree with a billionaire-backed project? Suddenly, they’re “misinformed.”

How dare they confuse living there with understanding it?

Who Among Us Has Not Received $135,000 From Interested Parties?

As you might recall, Stuart Adams chairs MIDA. He is also the Utah Senate President and currently in the fight of his political life — his first-ever primary election, against two Republican challengers.

On April 24, Adams, chairing the MIDA board, approved Stratos. They issued a statement calling it a project that “supports the free world.” Quite a spin for a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center in Box Elder County, Utah, but sure, Captain America, save the day with server racks.

And by what can only be chalked up to pure coincidence, seven days later, five entities with business before MIDA made donations totaling $135,000 to his political action committee — all on the same day. As Utah Political Watch reported, these are the five largest donations in the Adams Leadership PAC’s six-year history. Combined, they nearly doubled the PAC’s existing cash on hand. The donors are tied to MIDA-overseen projects at Deer Valley and Jordanelle — not to the O’Leary deal specifically. Utah Political Watch is careful to note that there is no direct evidence linking the donations to the data center approval.

Just a tiny, little, bitty, $135,000 coincidence. Barely worth noticing. Please avert your eyes from the giant money piñata.

So to put a bow on it, the Senate President and chair of an agency with enormous power over development in Utah, approved a major project meant to be kept under wraps. One week later, companies with business before that same agency wrote the largest checks in his PAC’s history. Adams is in a primary he needs to win. Utah law permits him to transfer PAC funds directly to his campaign. If he does, as Utah Political Watch notes, MIDA-connected donors will have effectively financed his political survival.

Just a very clean, very legal, very Utah-shaped structure where the people making development decisions can also raise money from people with business before the development board they chair. Cool system. Working exactly as it was designed to work for the people who designed it.

Congratulations, You’re a Water Rights Advocate Now

The county commission vote was round one. The fight is not over.

The project still has to clear water rights approval, where 3,700+ formal protests have already been filed. It needs environmental permits. It faces potential litigation. MIDA is required to form a public design review committee with public meetings at every phase.

So what we’re saying is: there is still so much bureaucratic fun to be had. The outrage and the attention need to stay in motion. Here’s where to direct it:

Sign Alliance for a Better Utah’s petition calling on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Senate President Adams. As Better Utah pointed out, this is not the first time Adams has used his position of power for personal gain. And here’s the important part: the Senate Ethics Committee is one of the rare legislative committees that is evenly balanced by party. That means Democrats on the committee have real power here. Maybe a tiny miracle?

You can also reach out to the Senate Ethics Committee members directly and ask them to investigate Adams’ role in MIDA, the timing of the PAC donations, and whether Utah’s current ethics rules are remotely adequate for this level of overlap:

• Sen. Ann Millner (R), Chair – 801-900-3897; amillner@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Luz Escamilla (D), Vice Chair – 801-550-6434; lescamilla@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Keith Grover (R) – 801-319-0170; keithgrover@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Karen Kwan (D) – 385-249-0683; kkwan@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Michael K. McKell (R) – 801-210-1495; 801-798-9000; mmckell@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Jen Plumb (D) – 801-870-0228; 801-870-0228; jplumb@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Kathleen A. Riebe (D) – 801-599-5753; 385-222-1742; kriebe@le.utah.gov

• Sen. Scott D. Sandall (R) – 435-279-7551; ssandall@le.utah.gov

Contact your state legislators. MIDA is a state authority, and the legislature has oversight power. Ask them why an unelected agency was able to approve something this consequential before the affected county knew it existed. Ask what accountability mechanisms exist. Ask why there aren’t more. Ask why they aren’t already doing something about it. Ask them how this squares with the resolution they passed after Trump said that we need to, and we’re quoting here both from the resolution and, ahem, a Truth Social post, make “the Great Salt Lake Great Again.”

Because if they are going to put that phrase into an actual legislative resolution, they can answer why a massive gas-powered data center on the Great Salt Lake watershed got rushed through before the public could meaningfully weigh in.

Track the water rights process. The Utah Division of Water Rights is where the next real fight happens. File a protest if you haven’t. It costs $15, because even civic resistance now comes with a processing fee. Make them answer the questions the county commissioners didn’t have to.

Keep showing up to MIDA’s public meetings. They’re required to hold them. Fill the room every time. Bring your friends.

This is the Utah we actually love.

Not the one with the tractor in soft lighting and the alfalfa fields arranged neatly around a politician’s origin story. Not the one where rural communities are praised in speeches and then managed around when a billionaire-backed project shows up.

The real Utah is messier and better than that.

It is people who disagree on plenty but still understand that water is not a partisan issue. Air is not a partisan issue. The Great Salt Lake is not a partisan issue. And being able to trust that massive decisions are not being made for us before we even know they exist should not be a partisan issue.

That is what makes this so insulting.

They keep selling a version of Utah built on family, land, faith, stewardship, and community, while running a government that too often works like a members-only club for the well-connected and well-off.

But the rest of us live here, too. We breathe the air. We pay the taxes. We raise the kids. We drive past the lake and wonder if it will still be there when they grow up.

That Utah deserves more than side doors, sweetheart deals, and lectures about being misinformed.

It deserves a government that remembers who this place belongs to.

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A few weeks ago, 300,000 people received a letter from the Lt. Governor’s office telling them that their voter registration information — which they had specifically chosen to keep private — would soon be publicly available to anyone willing to pay a fee. Scary! What makes it worse is that the bill behind it was run by Sen. John Johnson and Rep. Trevor Lee, two legislators with a well-documented history of trying to turn voter data into a commodity.

We want to explain exactly what SB153 does. But we also want to give you some context that comes specifically from our experience running campaigns in this state. Because in some ways, this law is genuinely concerning, and in other ways, it brings Utah back in line with how every other state in America already works and how Utah used to work, too.

First: What Even Is a Voter File, and Why Does It Matter?

Every state maintains a voter registration list — a database of everyone who is registered to vote. Depending on the state, that list contains some combination of your name, address, party affiliation, age range, and vote history, meaning which elections you participated in, but never who you voted for. This is called the voter file. It is the foundational tool of political campaigning everywhere in America, and it has been for decades.

Who can access it, and under what conditions, varies by state. After SB153, Utah joined more than 30 states that allow voter files to be purchased by anyone with a political interest. Another 19 states limit access to specific groups like campaigns, parties, nonprofits, and journalists. Zero states lock it away entirely. The voter file is how candidates find out who their voters are. It’s how parties identify their own members. It’s how campaigns figure out who to talk to, who to turn out, and who they actually represent. It is not a secret list. It is the basic infrastructure of participatory democracy.

What the voter file typically contains is closer to what used to be in the phone book: your name, your address, your party affiliation, and a record of whether you voted in recent elections. That’s it. The goal is to help candidates reach voters. Not to expose you, not to surveil you — to let the people running for office in your community know that you exist.

Utah was a dramatic outlier in this landscape.

What the Bill Actually Does

SB153 rolls back voter registration privacy protections that have been in place since 2018. Starting May 25, your full legal name, voter ID number, home and mailing address, voting precinct and districts, party affiliation, voter status, and a history of which elections you’ve voted in will be available to anyone who pays a fee to access the state voter list.

A few things that are important to say upfront. Your Social Security number, driver’s license number, and full date of birth remain private for everyone, under both state and federal law. It also does not include who you voted for in any given election.

There is no public lookup tool where anyone could type in your name and pull up your address. It’s not a list posted on a website somewhere. There is no searchable database. What exists is a bulk voter file that can be purchased from the Lt. Governor’s office for $1,050, only for specific political purposes, by campaigns, parties, and political organizations. Nobody is walking up to a government counter and asking for your address specifically.

The law also clarifies that voter lists can only be purchased for those specific political purposes. It is a class A misdemeanor to knowingly disclose information obtained from the voter list on the internet. The doxxing concern we’ve heard a lot about is real and valid, but the law does have guardrails.

To keep your record protected under the new law, you have to qualify as an “at-risk voter.” That category covers victims or threatened victims of domestic or intimate partner violence (with or without court orders or police reports), law enforcement officers, military members, public figures, and people protected by a court order. It also applies to anyone who lives with someone in any of these categories. The deadline to apply is May 6. Forms are at vote.utah.gov/voter-privacy-information.

Here’s the part that got buried in early coverage: the 300,000 letters were just the first wave, sent to voters in “withheld” status. Another million voters will lose their “private” status. All told, this law affects 1.3 million of Utah’s roughly 1.8 million active registered voters. That is most of the state.

How We Got Here: A Brief History of Utah Being the Only State Like This

Before 2018, Utah voter registration information was public, like it is in most states. Then the Legislature passed two laws — SB74 and HB218 — that created a new opt-in privacy system.

The implementation created a mess that nobody fully intended. Utah ended up with two distinct privacy categories that worked very differently from each other, and most people had no idea which one they were in or what the difference actually meant.

“Private” voters still had their information shared with political parties, candidates, and their contractors — it just wasn’t available to the general public. “Withheld” was the genuinely locked category, where records could not be released under any circumstances. So if you were a domestic violence survivor who needed real protection, “withheld” was the status that was actually private. “Private” was more of a medium setting: your information was still going to campaigns and parties.

The problem is that both categories ballooned far beyond what anyone anticipated. The “private” category grew to around a million voters, many of whom appear to have ended up there without actively choosing it. This is something we know from working in Utah politics: the way voter registrations were processed, including through the DMV, pushed a significant number of people into private status by default rather than by deliberate decision. The private record opt-in is just a big check box at the bottom of the voter registration form, so a lot of folks just… checked it. Many voters were classified as private without any reason listed for the classification.

The result: since 2018, Utah has been the only state in the country allowing voters to withhold their information without a reason. Utah’s deputy director of elections has said the change will make election administration “cleaner and simpler” following multiple confusing changes to privacy status over the past decade. The system was genuinely broken in ways that had downstream consequences for everyone.

Since 2018, the Legislature has debated whether those laws went too far and created unintended consequences. What they never did was find a careful, targeted fix — something that cleaned up the accidental-default problem while keeping strong protections for people with genuine safety needs. Instead, they handed the bill to two of their least careful members and got SB153.

About John Johnson and Trevor Lee

These are two of the most reliably problematic actors in the Utah Legislature, and that track record matters for understanding how this bill got written.

Trevor Lee, in particular, has spent multiple sessions trying to push voter data into territory that would make SB153 look modest. Earlier this very session, he had a voter registration cleanup bill that he amended on the floor into a voter data-selling scheme. The Senate killed it immediately.

Johnson’s stated rationale is that SB153 brings Utah in line with federal law. Utah’s previous system had created real legal exposure. Phil Lyman sued the state in 2025, arguing that the “withheld” status violated the National Voter Registration Act, which requires voter records to be open to public inspection. That lawsuit was ultimately dismissed because the judge ruled Lyman wasn’t directly harmed as a candidate, but the underlying legal tension was real, and it was part of why the Legislature acted.

What the law does poorly is the at-risk exemption. The protection may be too narrow and too bureaucratically burdensome. The threshold should be lower, and the process should be easier. That is a legitimate and important criticism of this specific bill.

The Implications for Democracy

We have spent years working to elect Democrats in Utah — one of the most under-resourced political environments in the country and there have been very real consequences to the 2018 laws.

Running competitive campaigns requires knowing who you’re talking to. When a Democratic candidate is trying to reach low-turnout Democrats in their district to encourage them to vote, those voters need to exist in the data. They might go to them with a different message than a voter they are trying to persuade. When a campaign is going door to door, the doors need addresses behind them. When a volunteer is phone banking, they need a list of actual voters in the district.

But here’s what we have watched happen in Utah because of a voter file where over half the state was effectively invisible to campaigns: Democratic candidates in competitive districts couldn’t find their own voters. Campaigns couldn’t identify who to persuade, who to turn out, or who needed to hear from them. Those voters didn’t get mailers, didn’t get door knocks, and didn’t hear from the candidate at all — which made them less likely to participate, which made already-difficult races harder to win.

It’s also harder to register new voters because we don’t know if private voters are unregistered or registered.

In a well-funded race, campaigns can partially work around a broken voter file by purchasing enhanced data from commercial brokers — third-party companies that compile voter information from dozens of other sources and sell it back for a premium. Which means campaigns with large budgets could reconstruct some of what was missing. Underfunded Democratic campaigns in competitive districts, which describes most of our work, could not. The voter file gap didn’t hurt everyone equally. It hurt the campaigns that could least afford it the most.

All of this is not to say that you should be happy that your data will soon be more accessible, but it may help to explain the motivations behind the legislature taking up this issue during a competitive election year.

What You Should Do Right Now

If you were in “private” or “withheld” status and have genuine safety concerns about your information being accessible, the deadline to apply for at-risk status is May 6. Here is exactly who qualifies:

• Victims, or likely victims, of domestic violence or dating violence

• Law enforcement officers

• Individuals protected by a protective or protection order

• Members of the armed forces

• Public figures

• Anyone who resides with a person in any of the above categories

Forms are at your county clerk’s office and at vote.utah.gov/voter-privacy-information.

And if you want this law to change, you know what to do. Contact your state legislators — and while you’re at it, make sure Sen. John Johnson and Rep. Trevor Lee hear from you too. They sponsored this bill. They should know how you feel about it.

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And since people keep asking — and we should have done this a while ago — we figured it was past time to give you the full picture.

This week we turned the mics on ourselves. Our backgrounds, how we got into this work, how our company came together, and why we are so annoyingly optimistic about Utah.

Listen in on your favorite podcast app or watch on Youtube.

Watch on Youtube

Listen on your favorite podcast app or you can see the full interview on YouTube:

Watch on YouTube

Amazingly, in the middle of everything that is happening in American politics right now, something went right. Not because the powerful suddenly grew a conscience. Not because the other side gave up or gave in. But because enough regular people decided that the truth mattered, that fairness mattered, and that (despite wondering if anyone would ever listen) they were willing to fight for it.

The Prop 4 repeal petition fell below the signature threshold this morning. The Lt. Gov will need to make the official certification at the end of April but it will, most likely, not appear on the November 2026 ballot.

This ballot initiative to permanently return gerrymandering power to the Utah Legislature — backed by $4.35 million from a Trump-aligned dark money PAC, the President of the United State’s endorsement, Don Jr. ‘s (and Ted Nugent’s for some reason?) online promotion, our senior Senator and Attorney General, Turning Point USA, and the full weight of the Utah Republican Party — is over.

The people who stopped it were regular people. They were volunteers, small dollar donors, the team at Better Boundaries who have been fighting this fight for eight years. Lawyers and plaintiffs from the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government who took this all the way to the Utah Supreme Court. Utahns who got a letter or a phone call, learned what they’d actually signed, and decided to do something about it. People who believed and kept believing – despite years of setbacks – that voters should get to choose their representatives and not the other way around.

Even when we are up against some of the most powerful people in the literal world, the underdog can still win. Simply by doing the right thing.

A Very Brief Retelling Of A Very Long Grudge Match

In 2018, a group of regular Utahns decided to do something about gerrymandering. People who thought it was wrong that politicians got to draw the districts that kept them in power, and who believed other Utahns would agree if they just asked them. They gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures — up against some of the toughest signature gathering laws in the country — put Proposition 4 on the ballot, and won. The independent redistricting commission was law.

The Legislature gutted it two years later.

They passed SB200 in 2020, stripping the commission of real authority and giving themselves the power to ignore its maps entirely. In 2021, they drew new congressional maps that carved Salt Lake County into four separate districts — splitting the most Democratic part of the state so precisely that all four congressional seats were effectively guaranteed Republican forever. Experts called it one of the most aggressive gerrymanders in the country. The Legislature called it their constitutional right.

The League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government sued. The case moved through the courts for years — slowly, expensively, unglamorously — the way that real legal fights actually work. In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature cannot erase voter-passed reforms that exist specifically to check legislative power. In August 2025, the judiciary reinstated Prop 4 in full and ordered fair maps.

The Legislature submitted a replacement map and emailed their own supporters calling it the map that would “stop the Democrats.” The judge rejected it. She adopted the plaintiffs’ map instead.

And before the ruling was even cold, the Utah Republican Party had a bit of a public meltdown and launched a petition to repeal Prop 4 entirely — using, ironically, the same citizen initiative mechanism that made Prop 4 law in the first place. Funded by $4.35 million from Securing American Greatness Inc., a Trump-aligned PAC. Out-of-state signature gatherers spread across Utah, misleading voters and using every resource available to hit their numbers, on the backs of vulnerable people.

They submitted over 200,000 signatures and cleared the very difficult geographic thresholds in exactly 26 of 29 Senate districts (exactly what is required by Utah law). In their most vulnerable district, their margin was just 658 signatures.

Under Utah law (because yes, the Legislature has historically wanted to make these initiatives as hard as possible), voters have 45 days from when their signature is posted to remove their name from a petition. Volunteers jumped into action. They made calls. They texted. Knocked on doors. Drove around the valley. Organized. People signed up for phonebanks and spent their evenings reaching out to voters who had been misled, explaining what the petition actually did, and walking them through how to remove their names.

On the last night of the legislative session, the Legislature passed a law banning prepaid postage for signature removal forms — a direct attempt to slow the campaign down. The Governor signed it the next morning. Voters kept going anyway.

Nearly 1,000 people in Senate District 15 alone removed their signatures so far. Nine thousand people statewide decided they didn’t want their name on that petition after all. This morning, SD15 fell 259 signatures below the threshold. The petition to repeal Prop 4 failed.

Absolutely none of this was guaranteed. None of it was easy. It happened because people spent years in courtrooms fighting for something most people never even heard about, and because thousands of volunteers believed that an informed voter is a powerful voter. The underdogs should not have won.

That is not a small thing. Especially right now.

Why We Get A Little Emotional

It would be easy, in this particular political moment, to look at four million dollars and a presidential endorsement and conclude that the math just doesn’t work for regular people anymore. It’s easy to be cynical. To think that the rules are written for someone else (and they are) and it’s not worth trying. That showing up is a nice idea that doesn’t actually move the needle. Today is evidence against that conclusion. Not a guarantee — but real, documented, specific evidence that people who cared about something real and true, who refused to stop, who trusted that other voters would care too if they just knew what they’d actually signed — were right. They deserve this moment. And in 2026, that matters more than this one petition.

We’re Not Done (Sorry, We Never Are)

There are still voters out there who were misled and still deserve the chance to remove their names. The 45-day window doesn’t close until April 23rd, and we are running phonebanks every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday until it does. Every person who was tricked deserves the opportunity to fix it and to have their voice heard.

Come make calls with us.

If you signed the petition and want your name removed: go to protectutahvoters.com, print the removal form, sign it, and mail or deliver it to your county clerk.

But…

Rob Axson, Utah Republican Party chair and leader of this now-failed initiative, said this morning: “This fight is not over but just beginning.” Amazingly, he’s telling the truth, and we’re not pretending otherwise.

Senate President Stuart Adams has floated calling a special session to put a constitutional amendment on the November ballot — language that would give the Legislature ultimate authority over voter-passed initiatives (including Prop 4). They tried something similar in 2024 with Amendment D, and the Supreme Court invalidated it for deceiving voters and failing to follow the law. They’re likely to try again.

But today, we let this be what it is. Eight years of work. Thousands of people showed up. An underdog story that ended the right way for the right reasons.

It doesn’t always. But today it did. And congratulations are in order.

But once the dust settles, the feelings can subside but the numbers never do. Because numbers tell you what actually happened.

So for all of our fellow data nerds, chart lovers, and people who enjoy staring at legislative spreadsheets like they’re baseball stats, this is for you. We’ve pulled together the numbers from the 2026 session and tried to interpret what they mean, the trends, and the outliers.

You can find the big themes, gossip, and breakdowns of specific bills over on the podcast and our last Substack. Today is just for the data.

More Bills, Fewer Results

This year set a record for bill introductions. The legislature filed 1,016 bills, the highest number we’ve seen. But more bills doesn’t necessarily mean more productivity.

Out of those 1,016 bills:

• 734 received at least one vote somewhere in the process

• 540 ultimately passed

That’s still a huge volume of legislation, but interestingly, it’s not higher than the record passage numbers from the last two sessions.

So, legislators had a lot of ideas this year but they just didn’t turn as many of them into law.

There are a few possible explanations. Maybe the legislature spent more time fighting internally? Maybe leadership was more selective about what they allowed to move? Or maybe the girls were fighting? Or maybe introducing a lot of culture-war messaging bills that were never going anywhere clogged up the system?

Looking at you, Trevor Lee.

At Elevate we tracked 166 bills closely throughout the session.

Here’s how those categories performed:

• Bills we supported: 44% pass rate

• Bills we opposed: 36% pass rate

• Bills we didn’t track or we’re neutral on: 57% pass rate

The neutral category had the highest success rate, which makes sense. A lot of the bills we don’t take a position on are the kind of technical or procedural legislation that quietly moves through the process, clean up code, were just fine pieces of legislation.

Still, the numbers are a good reminder that the legislature passes a lot of bills most people never hear about while the controversial ones soak up all the attention.

This is one of our paid subscriber posts. If you value the deep data analysis and charts, consider subscribing for free and if you like it, you can keep the $6/month subscription.

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It’s officially been one week since the legislative session ended. We meant to get this recap out sooner… but between the post-session fog, Gabi’s literal concussion fog, catching up on actual life, laundry, and sleep, and trying to remember what daylight looks like, that just didn’t happen.

So here we are — slightly rested, marginally hydrated, and finally ready to talk about what the hill just happened.

We’ve talked through the big themes, the drama, and the gossipy moments over on YouTube and the podcast. So this won’t be that. In fact, in consideration of word count, we haven’t included much commentary here. But many have asked for a comprehensive list of what passed and what didn’t. So, for those of you who like your politics with bill numbers attached (nerds), here’s the rundown of most of what went down this session or at least the big things we were tracking.

Win Wins: Good Bills That Passed

We know we didn’t give you a lot of good news during session. We feel bad about that because there are genuinely positive things that happen. But when you’re drowning in bad bills and chaotic hearings, it’s hard not to focus on the fires instead of the things quietly going right.

But that’s also part of the problem with politics and media. The bad stuff dominates the conversation, and the good work can disappear under the noise. We don’t want to fall into that trap either. So before we get back into the depressing stuff, here are the bills that actually made things better or sorta nudged Utah in a better direction.

SB0069 — School Device Revisions (”Bell-to-Bell Phone Ban”) | Sen. Lincoln Fillmore – Extends Utah’s school phone ban from “during instructional time” to the full school day — bell to bell instead of just during class. Kids can still have phones; they just can’t be on them all day at school.

HB0068 — Housing and Community Development Amendments | Rep. Calvin Roberts – Consolidates Utah’s fragmented housing programs into a single new Division of Housing inside the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, with one director accountable to the Governor. Housing advocates have been asking for this kind of coordination for years. It responds to actual audit findings about the lack of coordination.

HB0051 — Adoption Amendments | Rep. Katy Hall – Significant updates to Utah’s adoption laws: strengthens protections for birth parents, reduces coercive financial practices by agencies, increases transparency and public accountability, and improves oversight.

HB0075 — American Indian and Alaska Native Education Amendments | Rep. Christine Watkins – Reinforces Utah’s commitment to American Indian and Alaska Native students by updating existing law, formalizing the state education plan, and allowing grant funds to be used for essential learning materials.

HB0087 — Animal Crime Victim Amendments (”Biscuit’s Bill”) | Rep. Verona Mauga – Speeds up rescue and care for abused animals by allowing courts to transfer or forfeit them before a criminal case concludes so animals aren’t stuck in limbo for months while cases drag on. Also allows courts to make abusers pay sheltering and vet costs.

HB0122 — Pregnant and Postpartum Inmate Amendments | Rep. Candice Pierucci – Extends postpartum recovery protections for incarcerated people to 12 weeks, limits the use of restraints during that period, and extends access to social workers to help with childcare and reunification planning.

HB0290 — Child Tax Credit Amendments | Rep. Tracy Miller – Raises the income limits for Utah’s $1,000 per child tax credit phase-out, letting more middle-income families qualify for the full credit.

HB0329 — State Employee Maternity and Leave Amendments | Rep. Ariel Defay – Expands paid family leave for state employees and public school workers, increasing postpartum recovery leave from three weeks to nine weeks and creating new paid leave options for adoption and other family situations.

HB0390 — Veterans PTSD Clinical Research Amendments | Rep. Jen Dailey-Provost – Supports clinical research into innovative PTSD treatment options for veterans including emerging therapies that fall outside current standard-of-care pathways like psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT. Utah’s veteran community has been waiting for this kind of legislative backing for evidence-based solutions, and it’s genuinely good to see it pass.

HCR006 — Concurrent Resolution Regarding the Utah Housing Strategic Plan | Rep. Stephen Whyte – Formally endorses the state’s Utah Housing Strategic Plan and commits lawmakers and the governor to support and track its implementation.

HB0296 — Water Commitment Amendments | Rep. Hoang Nguyen – Creates a pathway for conserved water to be directed to the Great Salt Lake rather than being automatically funneled toward future development and consumptive use. In a state watching the lake collapse in real time, this is a meaningful step.

HB0339 — Street Medicine Amendments | Rep. Tyler Clancy – Directs the University of Utah Health to study the creation of a formal street medicine program bringing medical care directly to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties, and requires the state to develop statewide guidelines and best practices.

SB0244 — Cardiac Emergency Response Plans in Schools | Sen. Jerry Stevenson – Requires schools to develop cardiac emergency response plans, including proper placement of AEDs and training staff in CPR and first aid.

SB0051 — School Safety Modifications | Sen. Derrin Owens – Creates a statewide system for tracking and sharing information about students who have made credible threats of violence when they transfer districts, with privacy protections and legal immunity for staff who report in good faith. The goal is to help schools identify dangerous situations earlier and prevent violence.

The Dodged Bullets: Bad Bills That Died

Some of the best parts about this year’s session were the moments where bad bills died. Continuing on with good news… Here are the bad bills that didn’t become law.

HB0088 — Public Assistance Amendments | Rep. Trevor Lee – The central immigration bill of the session. Would have tightened verification of lawful presence to receive most public benefits — narrowing existing exceptions and restricting access to programs for undocumented Utahns including WIC, immunizations, and communicable disease treatment. It failed. Seven attempts across the session, including a resurrection through HB386 after the original died.

HB0386 — Immigration Amendments | Rep. Lisa Shepherd – After HB88 failed after multiple attempts, this bill was used as a vehicle to insert essentially the same language. No Senator wanted to attach their name and reputation to this poison pill.

HB0085 — State Sovereignty Amendments | Rep. Lisa Shepherd – Declared that the UN, WHO, and World Economic Forum have zero legal authority in Utah and blocked state and local officials from declaring emergencies based on those organizations’ declarations. Passed the House, failed in the Senate.

HB0095 — Public Employee Gender-specific Language Requirements | Rep. Nicholeen Peck – Would have protected public employees — including teachers — from discipline for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns, as long as they claimed a religious or moral objection. Didn’t even make it through the first step.

HB0096 — Ivermectin Amendments | Rep. Trevor Lee – Would have allowed pharmacists to dispense ivermectin without a patient-specific prescription through a standing order system. Failed in committee.

HB0152 — Educational Vaccine Exemption Amendments | Rep. Trevor Lee – Would have made it easier to get a school vaccine exemption by eliminating the requirement that parents complete an education module or consult with a provider first — stripping out the exact “pause and learn” step designed to reduce misinformation. Failed in committee.

HB0156 — Blood Transfusion Amendments | Rep. Kristen Chevrier – Would have required hospitals to accept directed blood donations from patients’ chosen donors — rooted in vaccine misinformation — and shielded hospitals from liability when that blood caused harm. Passed the House, then failed in a Senate committee. Pour one out. Bring Your Own Blood is cancelled for the second year in a row.

HB0183 — Sex Designation Amendments | Rep. Mark Strong – Initially a bill run by Rep. Trevor Lee, but after his toxicity killed the rest of his bills, he tried to gift this to another legislator. Would have replaced “gender” with “sex” throughout state law, wiping out legal protections tied to gender identity in housing, employment, and more for transgender Utahns. It got slightly less bad and passed the House and then failed in the Senate.

HB0193 — Transgender Medical Procedures Amendments | Rep. Nicholeen Peck – Would have banned all public funding for gender-affirming medical care, including through Medicaid and public employee health plans. Failed in Senate committee. Nicholeen Peck is closely following Trevor Lee for toxic and unproductive legislators.

HB0196 — Highway Designation Amendments | Rep. Trevor Lee – Would have let the Legislature override cities to rename local roads — and immediately used that power to designate Salt Lake City’s 900 South as “Charlie Kirk Boulevard.” Didn’t even see the light of day.

HB0210 — Tax Penalties Amendments | Rep. Melissa Ballard – This bill would have repealed Utah’s Earned Income Tax Credit — one of the most effective anti-poverty tools in the state’s toolkit, and a hard-won victory for working families. Failed in the House after being circled three times.

HB0232 — Medicaid Abortion Payment Amendments | Rep. Nicholeen Peck – Would have blocked abortion providers from qualifying as Medicaid providers, cutting off access for Medicaid patients who rely on those providers for reproductive care. Died without seeing the first step.

HB0244 — Employment Amendments | Rep. Lisa Shepherd – Would have prohibited employers from retaliating against employees who cooperate with law enforcement — including ICE agents. In practice: a bill designed to prevent employers from protecting their workers during immigration enforcement operations. Held in committee.

HB0256 — School District Elections Amendments | Rep. Jason Kyle – Would have made local school board races partisan, requiring candidates to run under party labels and through party primaries. This supercharges national culture-war politics in community-level governance and makes it dramatically easier for outside money and party machinery to take over local school boards. Didn’t go very far.

HB0262 — Judicial Election Amendments | Rep. Jason Kyle – Would have raised the threshold for judicial retention elections from a simple majority to 67%. One of the bigger judicial power grabs that didn’t survive.

HB0287 — Immigrant Driving Amendments | Rep. Trevor Lee – Would have repealed Utah’s driving privilege card program entirely, eliminating the legal pathway that allows undocumented Utahns to drive to work, school, and the doctor.

HB0294 — Employer Verification Amendments | Rep. Tiara Auxier – Would have lowered the threshold for mandatory E-Verify (immigration status) requirements from 150 employees to 50. Was amended and died in the Senate after passing the House. This is the second year in a row this legislation failed.

HB0315 — Human Development Instruction | Rep. Nicholeen Peck –Would have required schools to show a specific “baby Olivia/Oliver” video that has been criticized for inaccuracy and misinformation by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in grades 3 through 12.

HB0399 — Prohibition Against Student Character Tracking and Grading Systems | Rep. Trevor Lee – Broadly banned social-emotional learning, wellbeing frameworks, and character education in public schools — with financial penalties, state audits, public shaming dashboards, and a private right for parents to sue. Would have caused schools to gut student support programs to avoid liability.

HB0479 — Election Code Modifications | Rep. Jefferson Burton – Dramatically rolled back Utah’s vote-by-mail system, requiring most voters to return mail ballots in person with ID and restricting drop boxes to staffed locations with limited hours. Would have made voting significantly harder for working people, seniors, rural voters, and people with disabilities. This is a really big deal.

HB0569 — SNAP Funds Amendments | Rep. Kristen Chevrier – Would have required Utah to keep seeking federal waivers to block SNAP recipients from purchasing broadly defined “ultra-processed” foods, with mandatory checkout system reprogramming if approved. Policing how low-income families feed themselves, session after session.

HJR005 — Proposal to Amend Utah Constitution - Judicial Nominations | Rep. Jason Kyle – Would have rewritten the constitutional process for judicial selection to allow the governor to bypass the nominating commission when appointing judges. One of the biggest judicial power grabs of the session and it didn’t make it.

The Losses: Bad Bills That Passed

Here’s where it gets harder. Despite public testimony, professional objections, and real long-term consequences, these bills made it through. And these are the bills that captivated the most attention during session.

Of all of the coordinated attacks of this session, none were worse than the attacks on the judiciary. That being said, the Legislature entered this session with an aggressive judicial restructuring agenda, and not all of it survived. The constitutional amendment that would have let the governor bypass the judicial nominating commission (HJR005) died. The bill that would have raised judicial retention elections from a simple majority to 67% (HB0262) died. The bill to gerrymander judicial districts (SB0308) died.

So it wasn’t as bad as it could have been but kinda bad is still bad — and three judicial power bills did pass and are now law.

SB0134 — Court Amendments | Sen. Chris Wilson – Plain and simple court packing. And signed by the governor within days of passing. Expands the Utah Supreme Court from five justices to seven and the Court of Appeals from seven to nine, at a cost of nearly $6.5 million — with no request from the court itself and active opposition from the Utah State Bar. The only part of this bill the judiciary actually asked for was the lower court funding, which the legislature used as cover to pass the expansion nobody needed. The timing — right after the legislature lost major cases on redistricting — was not subtle.

HB0392 — District Court Amendments | Rep. Matt MacPherson – The story of this bill is almost the story of the session in miniature. It started as an unambiguously terrible bill: a new statewide constitutional court with judges hand-selected by the governor and exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to state laws — a structure no other state has ever attempted. Under pressure, the bill got amended. Judges would now be randomly selected from existing district court judges across the state. That was an improvement. But the core problem stayed: only the attorney general, the governor, or the Legislature can invoke the three-judge panel — and that invocation cannot be challenged or reviewed. So when the bill passed and was signed, the AG’s office immediately started using it to yank pending cases — redistricting, the Great Salt Lake, the abortion ban — out of the hands of their assigned judges and into the new panel. Plaintiffs filed for restraining orders. Lawsuits piled up so fast that the Legislature had to pass an emergency same-session patch, HB366, opening the panel to any litigant (not just the Gov, legislature, and AG). They think the fix will put them in a better place for the litigation but the fact that they needed it says everything. This bill is still being litigated and will be for some time.

SB0233 — Judicial Performance Evaluation Amendments | Sen. Brady Brammer – Expands judicial performance surveys to include plaintiffs and other parties, and asks those individuals to evaluate a judge’s “legal competence” — including their understanding of constitutional law. Framed as transparency. Functions as a mechanism to build a public record against judges who rule against the legislature.

And for the non-judiciary bad bills that passed….

HB0209 — Voting Amendments | Rep. Cory Maloy – Creates a two-tier voting system in Utah. People who can’t provide documentary proof of citizenship — even if they are U.S. citizens — can register and vote only in federal races, not state or local ones. It also expands voter roll investigations and shifts the burden of proof onto voters on short timelines. A solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, creating a real problem for voters who do.

HB0136 — Unlicensed Driver Amendments | Rep. Matt MacPherson – Escalates driving without a license or driving privilege card from an infraction to a misdemeanor. In practice, an immigration enforcement tool, targeting the undocumented Utahns who can’t obtain standard licenses and who depend on driving privilege cards to get to work.

SB0174 — Exercise of Religious Beliefs and Conscience Amendments | Sen. Keven Stratton – Creates a broad “right of conscience” for healthcare providers, hospitals, and insurers to refuse to provide, participate in, or pay for any healthcare service that violates their religious or moral beliefs — with no requirement to refer patients elsewhere.

HB0174 — Sex Characteristic Change Treatment Amendments | Rep. Rex Shipp – Strengthens Utah’s existing ban on gender-affirming hormones for minors by removing the grandfathering provision that allowed kids already in treatment to continue, and requiring them to taper off within six months. Young people who have been on treatment for years now face forced medical transition.

HB0274 — Sentencing Amendments | Rep. Mike Schultz (the Speaker) – Removes most defense attorneys from the Utah Sentencing Commission and replaces them with more law enforcement. It got marginally less bad during the process — the three defense attorneys were restored — but it still removes the juvenile defender and indigent defender from a body that determines how Utah punishes people. The Speaker sponsoring a bill that weakens defense representation on sentencing policy is not subtle.

HB0214 — Firearms Liability Amendments | Rep. Jordan Teuscher – Makes it harder to sue gun manufacturers and sellers in Utah by narrowing the circumstances under which lawsuits can proceed, blocking claims based on consumer protection or public nuisance law unless those laws explicitly regulate firearms, and creating an extremely narrow standard for negligent marketing claims. Fewer legal tools for communities harmed by gun violence.

HB0404 — Sex-Designated Housing Amendments | Rep. David Shallenberger – Creates an exemption in the Utah Fair Housing Act that lets landlords designate certain shared living spaces as single-sex based on biological sex at birth.

HB0222 — Limitation of Actions Amendments | Rep. Carl Albrecht – Grants fossil fuel companies special legal immunity that no other industry enjoys, preemptively blocking courts from holding them accountable for climate-related harms. Utah families bear the real costs of climate change — wildfire smoke, drought, extreme heat — while this bill removes one of the remaining legal tools available to seek accountability. Sets a dangerous precedent by taking certain claims off the table before courts can even evaluate them.

HB0060 — Water Rights Amendments | Rep. David Shallenberger – Makes it significantly harder for the public to challenge new water rights by limiting who has standing to protest. Also removes the requirement that the state engineer consider whether a new water right would harm public welfare, recreation, or the natural stream environment.

HB0495 — Capital Felony Case Amendments | Rep. Candice Pierucci – Overhauls Utah’s death penalty process to prioritize speed over fairness — weakening protections for intellectually disabled defendants, limiting court review, and restricting appeals. The stakes of getting this wrong are about as high as they get.

HB0545 — Budgetary Modifications | Rep. Val Peterson – Removes the State Auditor’s ability to access emergency funds when she needs them to investigate the Legislature. The body that controls the Auditor’s budget is cutting off the Auditor’s ability to investigate the body that controls the budget. There is not a more concise description of what this session was about.

SB0242 — Transportation Amendments | Sen. Wayne Harper – A state takeover of Salt Lake City’s streets. Strips the city of meaningful control over major road decisions and hands veto power to UDOT, requiring freeway-style standards like 12-foot lane widths for city streets.

SB0295 — Intellectual Diversity in Education and Government | Sen. John Johnson – An anti-DEI omnibus expanding and hardening Utah’s existing bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across K–12, higher ed, and state government.

The Most Painful: Good Bills That Died

These are the ones that sting. Every session, we spend weeks watching good people fight for legislation that would actually improve lives and then watch it die quietly in a committee room or on a floor vote. Most of these ideas are common sense. And most of them died not because they were bad policy, but because a supermajority that controls every gate in the process chose to let them. When good bills die it usually isn’t because the policy was weak. It’s because someone with power decided it wasn’t worth their time, or that it conflicted with a donor priority, or simply that the clock ran out (which is also a choice).

That’s part of what we try to do here — make sure the losses get named, too. Because the people who worked on these bills deserve that, and so do the Utahns who would have benefited from them.

HB0080 — Firearm Storage Requirements | Rep. Andrew Stoddard – Would have created a misdemeanor when an adult leaves a loaded gun unsecured, a child under 16 accesses it, and carries or uses it unlawfully. One of the most evidence-backed interventions for reducing gun deaths by suicide and accidental shooting, especially involving children.

HB0029 — Unfair and Deceptive Pricing Amendments (”Ban Hidden Fees”) | Rep. Tyler Clancy – Required businesses to show the total price upfront — no more bait-and-switch where mandatory fees appear at checkout. Passed the House with only 3 opposed. Never made it to a Senate committee. All-in pricing. What a concept.

SB0180 — School Nutrition Amendments | Sen. Luz Escamilla – Expanded access to free school meals for families earning up to 200% of the federal poverty level using existing liquor tax revenue. Passed the Senate unanimously, in committee and on the floor. Got held in a House committee.

SB0248 — Childcare Amendments | Sen. Luz Escamilla – Created a public-private partnership to retrofit obsolete state buildings into childcare facilities leased to employer sponsors. State employees get childcare access, the state gets lease revenue, employers can actually help workers afford care. Made it all the way to the final step and died on the House floor.

HB0245 — Construction Wage Standard Act | Rep. Tyler Clancy – Reestablished prevailing wage standards for state construction projects, ensuring workers on publicly funded projects get paid fairly. Died on the House floor after passing committee.

SB0176 — Landscaping Procurement Amendments | Sen. Stephanie Pitcher – Required state agencies to buy electric-powered landscaping equipment for smaller state properties in urban counties. Cuts emissions, protects workers from noise and pollution, saves money. Made it all the way to the House floor and died by a single vote. One vote.

SB0215 — Eviction Record Amendments | Sen. Stephanie Pitcher – Shortened the waiting period for automatic expungement of dismissed eviction cases. Right now, even a dismissed eviction follows renters for years, locking them out of housing, jobs, and credit.

SB0076 — Residential Rental Payment Reporting Amendments | Sen. Jen Plumb – Would have required large landlords to offer renters the option to have on-time rent payments reported to credit bureaus. Rent is often a household’s largest monthly expense but rarely helps build credit. Held in Senate committee.

SB0253 — Library Materials Amendments | Sen. Mike McKell – Required clear public policies for how library materials are selected and challenged, limited repeat challenges to once every four years per title, kept materials available while under review, and prevented removal solely due to partisan, ideological, or religious disapproval. Written in collaboration with librarians and affected communities.

HB0104 — State Holiday Amendments | Rep. Ryan D. Wilcox – Would have made Election Day an official state holiday. Failed on the House floor 33-39. A bipartisan idea — sponsored by a Republican — that somehow couldn’t get bipartisan support.

HB0106 — School Attendance Changes | Rep. Andrew Stoddard – Would have established chronic absenteeism data requirements and a study to better understand and address the problem.

HB0184 — Small Lots and Starter Homes Amendments | Rep. Raymond Ward – Created a fast-track process allowing property owners to override local zoning for starter homes, smaller lots, and ADUs, with automatic approval if a city didn’t act within 30 days. A market-friendly approach to the housing crisis that died in rules.

SB0056 — Citizenship Education Amendments | Sen. Kathleen Riebe – Would have required a specific civics curriculum for 10th graders covering voting rights, jury duty, tax responsibilities, employment rights, and interactions with law enforcement.

SB0136 — Enforcement Activities Amendments | Sen. Nate Blouin – The “ICE Out” bill. Would have prohibited state and local law enforcement from assisting ICE in operations at churches, hospitals, libraries, courthouses, and other sensitive locations, and required federal immigration agents to remove face coverings during enforcement.

SB0177 — Product Pricing Amendments | Sen. Stephanie Pitcher – Would have required businesses to clearly disclose when a price was set by an algorithm using a customer’s personal data.

HB0596 — Homelessness Amendments | Rep. Steve Eliason – A sweeping homelessness services bill that would have taken shelter capacity limits away from cities and given them to the state Office of Homeless Services, created a “Code Red” emergency alert system for extreme heat mirroring the existing Code Blue for extreme cold, and made other significant improvements to how Utah coordinates homelessness services.

What’s Next

The session is over. But we definitely don’t stop here.

We have a lot planned. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing deeper dives into the things that didn’t fit here. And all the other exciting things happening in Utah politics.

We also want to give a shoutout to Ben Winslow at Fox13 for his incredibly comprehensive and complete recaps on the session. Also check out this week’s RadioWest episode (you might hear some familiar voices).

Finally: we are genuinely, deeply grateful for everyone who followed along this session. Everyone who contacted their legislator, showed up to Hill Talk, shared a post, sent an email, made a call, or just read this far into a very long Substack. You have no idea what it means to us to not be doing this alone. Utah is worth fighting for. You prove that every time you show up.

We’ll see you out there.

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This week we’re skipping the bill-by-bill breakdown (that’s coming in the Substack, don’t worry) and going straight to the drama.

Is this journalism? Debatable. Is it accurate? Allegedly. Did it happen? Our sources say yes. Here is how session felt to us. What did you think?

You’re going to want to see the images we reference so we would recommend watching on YouTube here.

This piece picks up where that recording ended, with some new developments. We would highly recommend listening to that for the full picture.

Trevor Lee’s L’s

Thankfully, Trevor Lee has not been having a great session.

His Harvey Milk → Charlie Kirk street naming bill hasn’t made it out of Rules. His Social Emotional Learning ban was killed in committee. His ivermectin bill died. His vaccine exemption bill died. His pregnant women parking pass bill — which he clarified was not about supporting women, but about Utah’s fertility crisis, because apparently the path to solving a fertility crisis is a closer parking spot— was held in committee. He had a perfectly fine voter registration bill that he somehow turned into a voter data-selling scheme on the floor, and the Senate killed it immediately — and we’ll be returning to that particular habit shortly. His bill that would have legalized hate crimes and discrimination against transgender Utahns and more – one of the most hateful pieces of legislation in the country – was watered down and then reassigned twice to other legislators because he was too toxic to its passage.

Which made HB88 — his signature immigration bill, the one he’s been nursing through seven substitutes all session — the win he needed. The thing that would make the rest of it worth something.

The bill has now been substituted seven times. The substitution process is, in part, a sign of bad legislating. Whether that means disagreement from legislators, technical mistakes, or confusion, it’s not a great sign. What HB88 has consistently done across those seven versions is strip existing exemptions from Utah’s immigration verification requirements — exemptions that currently allow state agencies to serve people regardless of immigration status for things like immunizations, crisis counseling, domestic violence shelters, food banks, and more.

Lee’s stated goal: “If we do our job and get rid of these incentives, then many will self-deport without us having to forcibly do it.”

At least he’s honest, and we’re clear on what this is.

The Human Cost Heard in Committee

As we discuss at length in the podcast, this bill is cruel. With the first iteration of this bill, the House committee hearing included devastating testimony such as:

• A pediatrician described a child with cancer who loves Elephant and Piggy books and prays each night for a cure — currently receiving treatment through the CHIP program that Utah Republicans voted to create in 2023, and that this bill would end for children like him

• A social worker asked: Where do I send an undocumented child who has been sexually abused? She didn’t get an answer

• Emmy Gardner, CEO of Holy Cross Ministries (4,700 clients annually, 85%+ survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or trafficking), testified that the services this bill eliminates are the specific pathways out of those situations

• A pediatrician noted that measles, whooping cough, and flu don’t check documentation, and that people exposed to heightened immigration enforcement are 12% less likely to accept vaccines

The kind of hearing where you leave needing to sit in your car for a while.

Lee’s response to the vaccine point: “If we’re so worried about these people needing our vaccines, they shouldn’t be here.”

Airtight. Moving on.

In the committee presentation, he didn’t spend much time discussing what the bill did and instead focused his entire argument through a fiscal lens, citing his statistics from a single FAIR report claiming a $931 million annual cost of “illegal immigration in Utah”.

We covered FAIR’s white supremacist and eugenics funding history and the report’s methodological problems extensively in the podcast. And that shit is genuinely crazy.

The First Floor Fight: “A Simple Bill to Clean Up Code”

HB88’s 5th substitute passed committee and hit the House floor. Lee introduced it — and I need you to appreciate this HILARIOUS joke he made, presenting it as “a simple bill to clean up code.”

On the floor, he released the 6th substitute, which had dropped the private right of action provision and removed the mental health care exemption. It also clarified that the bill no longer applied to minors.

A few Republicans moved amendments:

• Rep. Clancy: made a change that child nutrition services should remain available regardless of status. That passed.

• Rep. Snider: made a change that domestic violence services should remain available regardless of status. Also passed.

Rep. Cheryl Acton, a conservative, said she couldn’t believe they were “hiding behind a bureaucratic shield to deny people food” and called it a violation of the Sermon on the Mount.

Rep. Stoddard invoked the Statue of Liberty and reminded the chamber that undocumented immigrants were paying over $250 million into the state. “It’s not being born here that makes you an American. It’s an attitude. A desire.”

Rep. Dunnigan asked whether, under this new version of the bill, someone walking into a homeless shelter in a snowstorm would need to prove citizenship. Lee confirmed: yes.

Then Rep. Karen Peterson moved to circle the bill. Circling means the bill gets placed on hold on the board — the sponsor can bring it back later, but they don’t have to, and bills can quietly die there. It’s procedurally gentler than killing a bill outright, but it can accomplish the same thing. Peterson said her phone was blowing up with stakeholders — cities, counties, service providers — who hadn’t understood how this would hit them on senior meal programs, emergency services, and more. They needed more time to figure out what they were even dealing with.

Lee rejected the motion: “It would just be reason that they don’t want the bill to pass.”

Voice vote (everyone yells their vote to be the loudest). The yeses had it. The bill was circled.

There was a rumor, and then a genuine exhale across the building: we thought HB88 might actually die on the board. Trevor Lee’s signature bill would join the graveyard of his other work this session: the ivermectin dreams, the parking passes, hunters registering to vote, legal transgender hate crimes, all of it.

That exhale lasted about 72 hours.

The Zombie Bill

On Friday afternoon, we heard HB88 is coming back. Curiously, though, in another bill.

Enter HB386, Rep. Lisa Shepherd’s bill. It was genuinely fine, unglamorous legislation — repealing outdated guest worker program provisions that Utah had no legal authority to enforce anyway, the kind of thing that exists on the books because nobody got around to cleaning it up. It had passed committee unanimously.

On the House floor, Trevor Lee moved to substitute the contents of HB88 with language nearly identical to HB88’s 7th substitute into HB386. This version, while not as bad as the original versions, contains restrictions for undocumented immigrants for access to: resident tuition for qualifying students, state retirement benefits, housing loans, professional licensing, and scholarships for Utah high school graduates.

This was not Lee’s first attempt at this strategy. Earlier this session, he had a fine voter registration bill, also passed unanimously, and on the floor, he substituted in language allowing the Lieutenant Governor to contract with outside vendors to sell voter data. The Senate was so disgusted by that maneuver that they killed his bill in committee. And they gave him a (satisfying for us) verbal lashing while they were at it.

The Floor Debate

When Lee proposed the amendment, Rep. Jen Dailey-Provost (D) rose immediately:

“This amendment is nothing more than HB 88 sub[stitute] seven substituted into another bill and is not entirely germane. I am deeply opposed to HB 88 and offended that this bill would be substituted into another bill.”

Rep. Ray Ward asked Lee: if a child was brought here very young, has lived here their whole life, and is now in college, do they pay in-state tuition under this bill?

Lee: “If you are here and you do not have citizenship, you will not be able to receive a grant or tuition that is subsidized by the taxpayers.”

Ward: “So out-of-state tuition is much more expensive to the point that many of those students would have to drop out... The school would forego that tuition money... the state would lose that tuition money. It’s really clear to me that we’ve hurt that person. It’s not clear to me at all that we have benefited the rest of us.”

Lee, on who benefits from blocking these students from college: “Utahns would benefit from this, people like our own children who are paying a ton for their college.”

Then Rep. Hoang Nguyen stood up. Of her own admission, she doesn’t share her story often.

Nguyen is the first Vietnamese American and the first refugee ever elected to the Utah state legislature. Then she told the chamber what that meant:

Her family fled Vietnam after the war. Her father was killed on the street in Oakland when Hoang was five, robbed and murdered by two young men with a gun. Her mother was 35, with seven children between the ages of three and fifteen. They went on Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance. A cousin in Utah told her mother it was a better place to raise a family. In 1992, they moved to the west side of Salt Lake. Her mother saved enough to buy a small house in Glendale. Her older siblings sacrificed their educations to help raise the younger kids. She was one of the lucky ones — young enough to go to college, which she did on Pell Grants and in-state tuition.

“My family and I, through the grace of God, through the programs that were in place to get us through the hard time, have been able to create a business where we’ve employed thousands of Utahns.”

She talked about Utah’s record — leading the nation in economic mobility, the bottom 20% able to reach the top 20% over a lifetime, and said that didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of a specific Utah way: supporting your community regardless of where people came from.

“Utahns are one thing. Citizens are one thing. People is the first thing… I fear that what we’re doing here in Utah is eroding what truly makes Utah special.”

The Procedural Nightmare

Rep. Norm Thurston (R) moved to circle again. He said he’d been on the phone with the drafting attorneys of the bill throughout the debate and could not determine what the substitute actually did.

“There is a reasonable chance, colleagues, that this bill makes it easier for undocumented kids to get in-state tuition because we don’t know what it really does. There’s a reasonable chance that it makes it harder for undocumented kids to get in-state tuition because we don’t really know what it does. So if you’re gonna vote on this bill, you better figure out for yourself whether you’re voting to make it easier or harder for those kids. I don’t know.”

Lee rejected the motion to circle, along with Thurston’s concerns. He knew any delay meant this bill could die on the board with his precious HB88.

What followed: 4 minutes and 30 seconds of representatives voting, changing votes, leadership whipping the floor.

• Initial tally: 34-29 to circle (Motion winning, we had hope, things might be okay)

• Call of the house: absent members are physically located and brought back to vote (why they aren’t there in the first place, we do not know)

• Tied 35-35 (cue team Elevate screaming at our computers)

• Then two Representatives (Shallenberger and Welton) who were originally yeses, switched their votes to no (Maybe leadership got to them, maybe it was peer pressure, maybe it was threats of their legislation never getting funded. We don’t know, but certainly something happened)

• Jordan Teuscher: 38th no vote

Motion to circle failed: 35-38.

So the bill lives, but it still has more votes. Back to the substitute. The Speaker ran a voice vote and ruled it passed this time. Division was called — meaning instead of yelling, they were going to take a recorded vote, on the board, on the record.

This vote went down in a similar way:

• Initially- 27 yes, 29 no. (Hope again!)

• Then: 30-30. (Screaming at computers, again)

• Then 34-31. (Not looking good)

• Then, ANOTHER call of the house (Unclear how they would’ve had time to leave since the last call of the house, but that’s neither here nor there)

• Welton — who had voted against Lee on the circle motion — flipped again at the last second to vote for the substitute (he ultimately voted against the final bill, though).

The bill was substituted with a vote of 40-31.

Forty-five minutes to turn a unanimous bill into a partisan one.

And we are still not done. The House still had to vote on the bill itself (now including the new HB88). It went down similarly to the above votes, but I think we have covered that.

That vote passed 39-33.

At the end of floor time, when asked if the Minority Caucus had any announcements before they recess, Rep. Angela Romero was in tears:

“There’s nothing from the Minority Caucus, and I want people to be mindful when we discuss things here, how it impacts people in this body.”

Rep. Casey Snider continued to make jokes.

The Vote Breakdown

While the vote was open, you could watch legislators’ thinking play out in real time on the board. Votes going up, coming back down, going back up. That’s not typically entirely indecision. It’s also a text message. It’s a conversation happening on the floor. Sometimes it’s leadership moving people into line while the clock runs.

A few standouts worth noting.

• Clancy and Snider both moved amendments to the original HB88 to make it less cruel — protecting child nutrition services, protecting domestic violence services. Then both voted for the substitute and the final bill anyway. Whether that’s pragmatism or cover is a question only they can answer.

• On the other side, a handful of Republicans broke against their party on both votes: Acton, Albrecht, Ballard, Barlow, Cutler, Defay, Dunnigan, Eliason, Kohler, Loubet, Tracy Miller, Monson, Okerlund, Karen Peterson, Sawyer, Thurston, Ward, and Watkins — having 18 Republicans vote against a bill like this doesn’t happen all that often in a supermajority state.

• Shallenberger and Welton originally registered as yes votes to circle the bill — meaning they initially supported pausing it — then switched to no before that vote closed. Shallenberger then voted yes on the substitute, moving the bill forward. Welton voted yes on the substitute but flipped to no on final passage.

• Worth paying particular attention to the Republicans in competitive seats. Okerlund, Loubet, Dunnigan, and Eliason all voted no on both the substitute and final passage — a meaningful signal from members who have real electoral incentives to think about how this plays outside the caucus. Ivory, MacPherson, and Koford went the other direction, voting yes both times, despite also being in competitive seats.

The Hat Trick, Explained

HB386 — now carrying HB88’s 7th substitute like Rosemary’s Baby — goes to the Senate, where it will get a committee hearing likely early next week.

So, let’s recap what Trevor Lee accomplished this week.

He took a bill that was dying. He found a bill that was fine. He put the dying bill inside the fine bill and walked it onto the floor on day 38 of 45 — a vote where the people who drafted it couldn’t explain what it did, in a process where the Speaker made a procedural error, in a chamber where the computer froze mid-vote.

And it passed.

It wasn’t good legislating. It wasn’t a careful refinement of policy. And it wasn’t the product of broad agreement or newly resolved concerns. It was desperation.

This is a legislator who has lost every single match this session, finding a way to pawn his racist, hateful, irresponsible legislation off to someone else because his brand became too toxic. And it came with no acknowledgment of the people affected. No reflection. No pause. Just more tweets about “Heritage Americans” and warnings about the “consequences of incentivizing illegal immigration.”

The reason the original bill was struggling wasn’t the message and policy mechanics. It was honesty.

He said the goal was self-deportation. He said compassion stops at the door of irresponsibility. He didn’t wrap it in technical corrections or neutral fiscal language. He stood at the mic and told the chamber exactly what he was trying to do. And that honesty — clarifying as it is for those of us watching — made it genuinely harder to build a majority around the thing. You could see it on the floor. Some Republicans were uneasy. About the students who grew up here. About the professional licenses and housing pathways. About what it looks like to vote yes on something when the sponsor has already explained that the point is to make people leave.

This does not have to be what Utah politics looks like. There is no law requiring that we pass policy aimed at making people afraid, that harms the communities we’ve spent decades building, that costs the state money it doesn’t have to spend, in service of goals its own sponsor can’t defend with accurate numbers. We are choosing this. Some members chose it because they agree with it. Some chose it because they couldn’t stand up to their own party. Some — you could see it on their faces — chose it because the clock ran out before they could figure out what else to do.

The Senate has seen this move before. They killed his last bill over it. Whether they do it again is now the only real question.

You can find your Senator’s phone number here. They’re hearing from people who think this is perfectly reasonable. They should hear from people who don’t.

Contact your state senator before HB386 gets a committee hearing.

Church & State – 370 S 300 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Over the past several weeks, hundreds of people have packed a room every Wednesday night. Together with Better Utah Institute and Better Boundaries, we’ve built something that feels rare right now: a space where people show up, learn what’s actually happening at the Capitol, and then immediately do something about it.

Every week, attendees have written and called their legislators on the issues moving in real time. Not hypothetically. Not someday. Right there, in the room.

But it’s been way more than grim bill updates and action alerts. It’s been community.

We’ve watched Gen Z attendees make vision boards about the future of Utah. We’ve had strangers show up with friendship bracelets. Someone 3D-printed ICE whistles and handed them out. Small businesses have donated food and supplies. People who walked in wanting to help but not knowing how have left connected to organizations and already getting to work.

It’s serious work. And it’s also sweet. And hopeful. And energizing in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve felt it.

We’ve heard from so many of you that being in a room full of people who care — who are trying to make Utah more welcoming, more balanced, and more representative — has been grounding. If you’ve been feeling discouraged, isolated, or just tired of doomscrolling alone, Hill Talk is the opposite of that.

February 25 – Housing and Homelessness

We’ll be joined by Utah Housing Coalition, First Step House, and Housing Connect to talk about housing and homelessness – what’s happening this session, what’s at stake, and how to push for real solutions.

And as always, we’ll break down what happened at the Legislature this past week, walk through how to take action in real time, and yes, there will be pizza and drinks.

RSVP here

March 4 – Community Fair Night

This one will feel a little different (in the best way). Nearly every organization that has participated this session — plus some new ones — will be there. Think of it as a one-stop shop for getting involved.

Legislative session ends March 6, and we don’t want the energy to end with it so this week will give you opportunities to meet people, learn where you can get involved, and hopefully take away some cool merch!

RSVP here

March 11 – Post-Session Party

We’re closing it out properly. Ice cream. A DJ. Drinks. Games. A collective exhale. Jackie and I will be there with sticky notes and a whiteboard because, of course, we will.

Showing up matters. But so does celebrating that we did.

RSVP here

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We built Hill Talk because the legislative session can feel isolating and overwhelming. What’s happened instead is that hundreds of you have turned it into something powerful.

Come for the policy. Stay for the people.

We’ll see you on Wednesday.

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And if you can’t attend but you do want to support these events and the work being done, you can donate here. Your contribution will be split between Elevate, Better Utah Institute, and Better Boundaries.

Subscribe now

But please accept our sincerest apologies for any sound imperfections and know that we are just two girls who care very deeply about Utah politics and very little about technology. We’re learning. Be gentle with us.

What we can promise you is that the content is worth it because this week we went down a rabbit hole so deep and so dark that we genuinely could not stop until we hit the bottom. And the bottom, it turns out, involves Nazi propaganda films, a eugenicist who tried to take over the Sierra Club from the inside, a sperm bank for geniuses, and 10 boxes of sealed archives at the University of Michigan that won’t be opened until 2035. All of this because Trevor Lee walked into a committee hearing and cited one source.

We’re breaking down HB 88 — Rep. Trevor Lee’s bill that would strip healthcare, food assistance, WIC, CHIP, domestic violence shelter access, and more from undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families in Utah. We cover who Trevor Lee actually is, where his numbers came from (spoiler: a federally designated hate group), why the math doesn’t add up, and what happened to Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia when they tried this exact same thing.

📌 Voices for Utah Children one-pager on HB 88: https://utahchildren.org/newsroom/speaking-of-kids-blog/protecting-utahs-immigrant-families-say-no-to-hb88#i
📌 FAIR 2023 report: https://www.fairus.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/utah2023.pdf
📌 ProPublica - John Tanton: https://www.propublica.org/article/john-tanton-far-right-extremism-environmentalism-climate-change

Elevate Utah

Utah politics, but digestible. We’re Elevate Utah—independent journalists and strategists explaining what’s happening in Utah politics, why it matters, and most importantly, what you can do about it.