File photo.
STATE OF UTAH — Utah Governor Spencer Cox appeared on the Utah Broadcasters Association’s Direct Link program Tuesday night, which was broadcast on NewsTalk KVNU.
Growth and affordable housing continue to be big issues and the governor had an interesting factoid about growth in the state.
“For the first time last year, more people moved into Utah from outside of Utah than our internal growth. Historically, over the last ten years, even though we’ve been the fastest growing state, it’s been internal growth that’s been driving that. So, for the first time we had more people moving from outside the state, but of those, that moved from outside the state, 25 percent of those are people who have lived here before. That’s very unique, in fact that’s the highest percentage anywhere in the country of people moving back to the place where they’ve lived before,” according to Cox.
The governor said they want to make sure this is a place where people can come back and raise their families.
“But, as I said in my State of the State speech, I said, we’re grateful that people want to live here, it’s an amazing state. All I ask is that you don’t try to turn us into where you just left, we really do have a special state, and it’s because we care about each other, we care about our neighbors, we try to take care of each other. Again, I’m a conservative, I believe it’s because of our conservative policies that we’ve had so much economic success.”
Over the past week, Utah, from north to south, has enjoyed some soaking rains that, unfortunately, have led to flooding in parts of southern Utah.
But Governor Cox said we should continue as though the overall drought is going to continue.
“So right now our statewide reservoir storage is about 51 percent on average capacity, which is actually a little better than last years, so I’m excited about that. But still we’re about 15 percent lower than where we should be for this time normally. We passed about 12 bills last year, and those are just coming into effect now, the funding just came into effect on July 1. We’re incentivizing conservation, that’s the most important thing.”
Cox said we have the first statewide grass rebate program, with 5 million dollars funding that.
Also, last week, the Board of Water Resources authorized 200 million dollars in funding for secondary metering, which can produce an average water reduction of 20 to 30 percent.