File photo. Governor Spencer Cox on a recent Direct Link statewide broadcast.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Governor Spencer Cox was back on the airwaves statewide for the Utah Broadcaster’s Association – sponsored Direct Link program, that was broadcast Tuesday evening on KVNU.
The governor has been very concerned with homelessness in Utah, saying he doesn’t want the Wasatch Front to become like Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He’s also very concerned about the price of housing. Last week, Cox along with Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson in their budget recommendations announced a $150 million investment toward building new starter homes in the state.
“We used to build starter homes in this country, most of us grew up in a small starter home, a thousand square feet to 1,500 square feet, something like that. Sadly we stopped building those for whatever reason about 15 – 16 years ago. So, we’ve been working very closely with the League of Cities and Towns, we’ve been working with home builders on what we can do to help increase new homes, starter homes, so that our kids can live here again.”
Governor Cox said their goal is to build 35-thousand starter homes over the next five years, working with the private sector to get that done.
Last year was a very good water year with all the record snowfall, but of course there were flooding concerns too. He was asked what the experts are telling him about the concerns if that should happen again. The comparison was made to the years 1982 through 1984.
“We didn’t have significant drought preceding those years like we have this time. And so, we have much more capacity than we had back then and that’s really great news for all of us. I won’t be turning on the pumps at the Great Salt Lake with another big water year this year, but I will say we do prime those pumps every year and make sure that they still work out there just in case.”
So, he feels we can have another good water year and still be fine.
With the federal government pushing the transition to electric cars, the governor was asked what he thought about that.
“I don’t think it’s wise for everything to go to electric, I think there is a place for electric and there are some definite positives with that. One of the issues with electric vehicles is we do need infrastructure especially in the West, there’s a lot of range anxiety.
For those of us in rural Utah, electric doesn’t work if you can’t recharge and recharge quickly and you have to drive. I was commuting 200 miles roundtrip every day for seven and a half years and I’m not alone in the state being able to do that. That’s really hard to do with an electric vehicle.”
So, he said he wants to be very cautious with that. He said the problem with this initiative too, is that many of the critical minerals that are needed to build these cars are found in Utah but because of federal environmental regulation, they can’t mine those minerals.