By Representative Christine Watkins, District 67
Friday, March first, the Utah State Legislature voted on its last bill at midnight. The House passed every bill on its board that needed to be voted on. Legislators requested 1377 bills and 110 resolutions, that is a total of 1487 pieces of legislation. There were 582 introduced from the House and 274 from the Senate.
Remember, there are 75 House members and 29 Senate members. We passed 340 House bills and 207 Senate bills and several HCRs, HJRs, HRs, and 2 SRs. That is a grand total of 591 pieces of legislation passed. We do not know yet if the governor will veto any of these bills. A lot of legislators tried to keep that number down by holding some of their bills.
I filed 10 bills, I passed four bills, and had the committee hold two bills that I will work on and take to interim committees starting in May. The other four I will work on during the summer to see if I want to file them again next year.
I have a bill dealing with the rural Dispatch Centers. It has a large fiscal note attached to it and it had some other issues. The last night of the session two auditors from the State Audit Department brought me a copy of three different audits of the dispatch centers. They highlighted the areas of the audits that will help me study and work out some of the problems of who pays what and how much. It is really a complicated issue, but our counties and cities need some financial relief. I passed HB70S1 Fatality Review Amendments, HB115 Cultural and Community Engagement Amendments, HB116 Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy Act Amendments, and HB410S5 Utah San Rafael State Energy Lab.
I have written about them in previous articles, you can also go to le.utah.gov to look up these or any other bills. I had to work hard to get the three million for the Energy Lab, plus three hundred thousand for the cities of Duchesne and Myton for their legal costs. Last session (2023) I spent a lot of time working with the DWR and DNR (Department of Natural Resources) dealing with buffalo damage on private property. We worked with DWR, and they used a helicopter to herd the buffalo back into the Ute Reservation. Having made that an awareness issue, Representative Chew from Uintah County tried to get some money to help pay for the damage that the buffalo caused.
He introduced an amendment to a bill, I supported it, but it failed. Then one of the staff members who works on Rep. Chew’s committee told him of a fund that he could get money from for this cause. He was able to allocate one hundred thousand dollars to be put into a fund for buffalo damage. I was really pleased with this.
We have several private ranchers who suffer damage every year and this will really help. The legislature passed a lot of bills to help make business easier, starting a business easier. We also reduced the hours required to be trained for several professions. I feel like I had an extraordinarily successful session.
I am pleased with the bills that will really help our part of the state. I have already had two bill file requests that I will file in May. We are allowed four priority bills guaranteed to be written for the 2024 session.
A special thank you to ETV News for printing these articles and keeping you informed on legislative activities. Thank you again for the opportunity to represent you. It is humbling and an honor.
christinewatkins@le.utah.gov Cell: 435-650-1969