Cache County Executive David Zook talks to KVNU For the People host Jason Williams on 8-03-2022

LOGAN — During the monthly KVNU County Hour on Wednesday, Cache County Executive David Zook  said he’s looking forward to another county-sponsored “Ignite the Light” Suicide Awareness Night on August 22nd.

“I really want to thank the radio group for being a sponsor, for helping us get the word out about the concert. It is coming up again, we are having an event again, and it’s going to be a great concert with Alex Boye. He does such a great job, he is the consummate entertainer, he connects with the crowd, his music, his dancing. He actually comes with a whole show in addition to the music,”  he said.

When it comes to suicide, Zook said he had no idea, when he first took office, how serious of an issue it is not only in the community, but throughout the Intermountain West and nationally.

“One of the things I learned from the many experts that I’ve talked to about this, and I’m not an expert on this, I’m not a mental health professional, but something I have learned from some of those mental health professionals is that, when you can connect people to resources, they all have a better outcome. And that’s the goal of this event, is to help people get connected to resources.”

“Ignite the Light” begins at 5p.m. at the Cache County Fairgrounds.

It’s a free public event and attendees can visit the community resource booths and food trucks that will be there, then at 7p.m. Boye will take to the stage.  You can get more information at cachecounty.org/ignitethelight.

During the program, Zook also talked about the continuing housing crisis.  Recently, he had an opportunity to present an extensive report on the crisis, especially, how it affects northern Utah.

He explained, “I have been watching it, everyone in our community has seen what’s been happening with housing, prices have been skyrocketing, supply has been limited.  There are so many factors that go into it, a lot of factors affecting us.  Part of it’s population growth, part of it’s supply chain, part of it’s inflation, there are a lot of things that affect our housing crisis and some of them we can do something about, some of them we can’t.”

Back in April, Zook formed a task force and he invited 50 different individuals to come together and sit on a housing crisis taskforce.  He reached out to a wide variety of interests, those in the banking industry, mortgage industry, developers, in addition to mayors, county officials, even a delegation from Congressman (Blake) Moore’s office.

“(We) had a student from USU who lives in student housing, had somebody representing the minority community, somebody representing veterans, somebody representing homeless community, just — we tried to really cover our bases and get as many experts at the table as we could.”

He asked them to take 60 days to study the issue and then give recommendations.

From their report, Zook said the thing that he found the most interesting is that 85 percent of the growth locally is not from people moving in from other states, but is internal, from local families.

He said he thinks that can affect how local officials look at this issue.

 

 

 



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