SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah’s Republican-controlled Legislature is meeting Wednesday to decide whether to ask voters in November to relinquish some of their rights to lawmakers who want the ability to change state ballot measures after they’ve passed.
Frustrated by a recent state Supreme Court ruling, lawmakers called a special session focused on amending Utah’s constitution to grant themselves power over citizen initiatives that the state’s highest court said they don’t currently have. The Legislature used its emergency powers, which are broadly worded, to hold the session.
If the amendment passes and is approved this fall by a majority of Utah voters, it would give lawmakers constitutional authority to rewrite voter-approved ballot measures to their liking or repeal them entirely.
The proposal also would let lawmakers apply their new power to initiatives from past election cycles, including the redistricting measure that spurred the state Supreme Court case that limited the Legislature’s authority.
Advertisement
Utah voters passed a ballot measure in 2018 that created an independent commission to redraw voting districts each decade and send recommendations to the Legislature, which could approve those maps or draw their own. The measure also prohibited drawing district lines to protect incumbents or to favor a political party — language the Legislature tried to strip out and replace with looser provisions in 2020.
Voting rights groups sued after lawmakers ignored a congressional map drawn by the commission and passed one of their own that split liberal Salt Lake County among four congressional districts, which have all since elected Republicans by wide margins.
Last month, all five Republican-appointed state Supreme Court justices sided with opponents who argued the Republican supermajority had undermined the will of voters when it altered the ballot initiative that banned partisan gerrymandering.
Utah’s constitution gives significant weight to statewide ballot initiatives, which if approved become laws equal to those passed by the Legislature. Lawmakers currently may not change laws approved through ballot initiatives except to reinforce them without impairing them, or to advance a compelling government interest, the Supreme Court ruled.
Now, the Legislature is attempting to circumvent that ruling by expanding its constitutional authority — but voters will have the final say.
Advertisement
Legislative Democrats have criticized the move as a “power grab,” while the Republican legislative leaders, Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz, have argued it’s dangerous to have certain laws on the books that cannot be significantly changed.
Utah isn’t the only place where lawmakers have sought the power to undo ballot measures — at least under certain circumstances. Changes to the political mapmaking process have been the impetus for such efforts in multiple states.
Missouri voters approved a new redistricting process in 2018 — the same year as Utah. Lawmakers promptly placed a new amendment on the ballot to undo some of the key elements, and voters approved the new version in 2020.
In 2022, Arizona lawmakers placed on the ballot a proposal that would allow them to amend or repeal entire voter-approved measures if any portion of them is found unconstitutional or illegal by the state or federal Supreme Court. Voters defeated it.
This year, an advocacy group has won a spot on the ballot in Ohio for a measure that would appoint a new commission to make legislative and congressional maps. State Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, objected twice to the ballot measure language.
Advertisement
A lower court in Utah also will revisit the process for redrawing the state’s congressional districts following the Supreme Court ruling, but the current boundaries will remain for this election cycle.
Like many utilities in the Trump era, Rocky Mountain Power is pulling back on its renewable energy plans. But more than a dozen Utah communities are taking matters into their own hands.
About 300,000 homes and businesses will soon be part of a novel, bottom-up program to bring new clean power to the state’s fossil-fuel-heavy grid. The Utah Renewable Communities initiative allows city and county governments to offset their electricity use with 100 percent renewable power, backed by a $4 monthly bill surcharge.
“There’s no other program available to our residents that is this affordable or this impactful to Midvale’s environmental and economic future,” said Dustin Gettel, mayor of the Salt Lake City suburb of Midvale.
Advertisement
Midvale is set to vote Tuesday on whether to join 15 other communities that have signed up ahead of an enrollment deadline next week. Three other eligible communities have opted out, although one may reconsider.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
A sprawling, 40,000-acre data center planned for northern Utah has stirred up controversy across the state over the past month, partly because of the pollution it’s expected to contribute to a region that already struggles with smog.
Officials with the quasi-governmental Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, which approved the project and created tax incentives to spur its development, have become de facto cheerleaders for the data center campus, called the Stratos Project. They say Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian TV personality and the main backer of Stratos, specifically selected a remote valley north of the Great Salt Lake because a gas pipeline runs through it.
The plant that will generate electricity for the data complex would be powered “100 percent off the Ruby Pipeline,” a MIDA official said in April.
But after weeks of protests, reams of comments against the project, and disgruntled Utahns digging into state leaders’ finances and family businesses, the state’s Republican governor has now asserted the project will “never” be solely powered by natural gas.
Advertisement
“That’s never going to happen,” Governor Spencer Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “The very first phase will be natural gas, but the other phases should not be. They should be nuclear, and they should be geothermal, and solar and other technology.”
The proposed Stratos Project is light on details so far. O’Leary has said that at full build, it will be one of the biggest data centers in the world, as large as Washington, D.C. Scientists, environmental advocates and some residents have raised alarms about the impact that the project — and the possibility of a massive natural gas plant to power it — could have on air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and water supplies near the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
According to some estimates, a 9-gigawatt power plant entirely powered by natural gas could raise Utah’s carbon emissions by 64 percent. Although it’s still unclear how much water the facility would need, the project’s developers have said they’re working to secure 13,000 acre-feet in Hansel Valley and the surrounding area, which is mostly agricultural. That’s enough water to meet the needs of more than 20,000 households in Utah.
The north end of the Great Salt Lake and Hansel Valley, the planned site for the Stratos Project.
Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune
Opposition to the proposal has been intense. A water right filed to support the data center and power plant received nearly 4,000 letters of protest this month. Opponents held a rally at Utah’s Capitol last week and delivered a letter to Cox with more than 6,000 signatures urging him to take “binding action” to preserve the Great Salt Lake instead of issuing platitudes over social media.
During a news conference on Wednesday announcing a geothermal partnership with the neighboring states of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, Cox acknowledged problems with the rollout of the Stratos Project in Box Elder County, saying future decisions like it should involve his office and elected representatives.
Advertisement
“There’s no question, the process was not good,” Cox told reporters. “It’s something I’ve worried about for a long time with that entity that made that decision.”
Cox appeared to be referring to MIDA, a development authority ostensibly meant to fund projects to support the military. Its biggest developments in recent years, however, include a hotel at the Deer Valley luxury ski resort and a swanky ski village. MIDA officials and other Stratos supporters have called the project a matter of national security.
“That was not a decision that was made by me or the Legislature,” Cox said. “In the future, those are decisions that should be made by us, so that we can do these types of things ahead of time to make sure people understand what’s actually happening out there. That did not happen, and it should happen.”
When he made his comments, Cox was hosting the final workshop in his “Energy Superabundance” initiative as chair of the Western Governors Association, part of a broader push that complements his “Operation Gigawatt” goal to more than double Utah’s energy production over the next decade.
Electricity use across the country has held relatively steady for decades, but a surge in demand for artificial intelligence computing and data centers is putting a strain on the electric grid. That’s left Western states scrambling to build new energy supplies.
Advertisement
At the same time, public skepticism toward large data center developments appears to be growing, particularly over concerns involving water use, noise, energy costs, and pollution.
“It feels like the future is here,” Cox said during his opening remarks at the workshop. “It’s coming quicker than people asked for, and there are so many amazing things that can come from that future, and some pretty awful ones as well.”
Read Next
Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built
Cox has also pushed for faster permitting timelines for large energy and infrastructure projects, arguing that environmental review processes often take too long. “This whole idea of being rushed — I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done,” he said in April. “It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not.”
Advertisement
Last week, Cox struck a more measured tone as criticism of the project continued to mount. “One of the things people are worried about, and rightfully so, is air quality,” he said in a brief interview as he left the workshop. “That’s a yearlong [permitting] process. … We’re not speeding those up. Those are really important, and we want to make sure that things are done the right way.”
Earlier this month, O’Leary, who was featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” also seemed to suggest that renewables could help power the Stratos Project. He described other technological advances — such as turbines cooled with air rather than water — before turning to the natural gas power causing a stir.
“We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind, and batteries, because the battery technology is 10x more efficient than it was just five years ago,” O’Leary posted on X on May 5. “So that’s very helpful, because it makes the cost of energy lower.”
But he stopped short of fully endorsing renewables for his project.
Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, calculated that a 9-gigawatt natural gas power plant will produce around 35 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. By comparison, the entire state of Utah generates 55 million metric tons annually, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So the Stratos Project could raise Utah’s emissions by about 64 percent.
Advertisement
“That’s massive,” Mitchell said. But it could be even more, because his estimate didn’t account for “any additional methane leakage” from piping and using the natural gas, he said.
