John Dougall, Utah’s state auditor and candidate for U.S. Congress, criticizes the sponsor of Utah’s 2024 transgender bathroom ban, alleges the law was just for show.

A toilet flushes. Then, Utah Auditor John Dougall steps out of a stall.

“Are you the bathroom monitor?” Dougall asks viewers of a video posted to his campaign account on X evening. “I actually thought the Legislature assigned me to be the bathroom monitor.”

The one-minute clip released on Monday — the first day of lawmakers coming together for interim meetings since this year’s session ended — is the latest in a feud that’s erupted between the auditor and Republican lawmakers since a transgender bathroom ban took effect earlier this month.

“We have a piece of legislation that the sponsor doesn’t seem to actually understand,” Dougall says in the video, his voice echoing in the small space. “She implied that I didn’t care about women’s safety in bathrooms — nothing could be further from the truth. And if this bill were actually about making girls safer, don’t we think that the Legislature could actually spend some money retrofitting bathrooms and providing greater privacy and further safety?”

Dougall continues, “Instead, it looks like this piece of the bill was really more about show than substance. But it wouldn’t be the first time the Legislature did something like that, would it?”

Morgan Republican Rep. Kera Birkeland’s “Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying and Women’s Opportunities,” or HB257, changes the legal definitions of “female” and “male” to categorize Utahns by the reproductive organs of their birth, and restricts which bathrooms and locker rooms trans people can use in government-owned buildings.

It requires new construction of state buildings to include single-occupancy “privacy spaces,” such as bathrooms or showers, and asks that existing buildings “consider the feasibility” of adding them.

The bill did not appropriate any funding toward building such spaces. A fiscal note did, however, note that a separate mandate that Dougall’s office “establish a process to receive and investigate alleged violations of this chapter by a government entity” would likely cost $20,000.

Within the first few days of the required reporting form going live, Dougall told The Salt Lake Tribune that his office had received thousands of hoax complaints. He released a statement on the state auditor’s website last week labeling the Legislature “invasive and overly aggressive.”

Birkeland has responded with reprovals of her own.

“The joke is on these activists,” Birkeland wrote on Thursday on X. “While they waste their time, Utah will continue to protect girls and women. And I look forward to working with our next state auditor, because I know that he will take the role of protecting women seriously.”

Dougall is not running to be reelected state auditor, but instead competing to replace Rep. John Curtis in Utah’s 3rd Congressional District.

PANGUITCH — Utah Prairie Dog Day was held Thursday at Bryce Canyon National Park to celebrate and raise awareness for the once-endangered species, and the large part Utah Prairie Dogs play in the state’s ecosystem.

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources coordinated the event with the park, where Petey the prairie dog joined a group of kids and parents. Research Egologist with the United States Geological Survey David Eads spoke and held games with the kids, and drawings from the event of Utah prairie dogs will be displayed in the visitor’s center.

“It’s important I think for adults too. Kids are really fun to teach, and oh my gosh it was amazing watching all the kids today. It was like — the line for all the kids that wanted to do the little prairie dog calling contest was amazing,” said Utah Prairie Dog Recovery Biologist Barbara Sugarman. “I think there’s so much to learn about what can be done with the species.”

According to the National Park Service, Utah prairie dogs are one of five species living in North America. Prairie dogs once scattered an enormous area of the western Great Plains, and Utah prairie dogs were recorded in numbers as high as 95,000 in the 1920s.

As western settlers continued to move in, the number of Utah prairie dogs declined because of pest control, disease, and loss of habitat. By 1972, Utah prairie dogs had been reduced to an estimated 3,300, the DWR stated. In 1973, the mammals were considered an endangered species.

“I know there’s definitely some conflict situations with Utah prairie dogs and we want to make sure we help those folks and also help the species at the same time. We do lots of trapping and translocation efforts in those conflict situations,” Sugarman said.

Sugarman said conservation strategists reintroduced a colony to Bryce Canyon National Park in the 1980s. Sugarman said 153 Utah prairie dogs now live inside the park, making up the largest protected population of Utah prairie dogs.

Range-wide, Sugarman said conservationists counted over 9,500 Utah prairie dogs during the spring count of 2023. However, because of the timing of the count, and the fact that young prairie dogs and newborns will not be seen, DWR estimated a population of over 69,500.

Sugarman said the DWR works with multiple other agencies, including biologists with Bryce Canyon, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the Utah Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, and even Utah counties.

She said that due to the communal effort, all units met their recovery goal for the first time in 2023, which was a “huge accomplishment.”

“It’s a really good story of conservation success, Utah prairie dogs are doing really well right now, the population is pretty close to one of the all-time high peaks right now,” Sugarman said. “I like to say it’s a good lesson of partnership and how working together really accomplishes amazing conservation goals.”

Not only is the tourism promotion relentless, it’s sometimes false advertising.

As the ski season shifts into the summer recreation season, would-be tourists are scrambling to book camp spots, entrance passes, hotel rooms and permits before they’re all gone. And as anyone who has waited in a Lagoon-like lift line at their local ski resort, or has discovered that there isn’t a Zion camp spot available until August knows, Utah is drowning in tourists.

The 2022-2023 ski season shattered the records for ski visits (7.1 million and a 22% increase) and money spent by out-of-state ski visitors ($2 billion). This year’s figures aren’t in yet, but despite less snow than last year’s record setting base, both in-state and out-of-state spending by skiers has increased the last four seasons, and will likely continue.

Just over a decade ago, in the spring of 2013, a 20-story “wallscape” debuted above L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard promoting Utah’s “Mighty 5″ National Parks. “The launch (was) placed in television ads, building wraps, digital billboards, magazines and social media (all over the U.S. and worldwide) at a cost of $3.1 million, (and) coincided with a steep increase in park visitation that has continued unabated ever since.” The campaign was a runaway success.

Since that time, visitor totals at Utah National Parks have nearly doubled, yet the number of full-time employees has remained the same or declined. The same is true for Utah’s ski resorts. “Despite the gush in skier and snowboarder visits, the number of recreational jobs, including for resort workers, remains roughly the same as it was in 2015-16 when Utah saw 2.6 million fewer skier visits.”

While these data certainly challenge the idea that tourism is such a great (but low paying) job-creator, I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that we’d be better off with the fossil fuel/cattle/alfalfa economy that our anachronistic state legislature adores. Utah’s outdoor recreation economy ranks ninth in the country and utterly dwarfs extractive industries in terms of jobs and revenues.

Despite the stewardship wisdom of the prophets, though, if what you really worship is profit, as Utah’s business and political leaders do, then massive tourist numbers are desirable. If, however, you care about wildlife, air quality, water supplies, garbage and sewage, traffic, solitude, open spaces, preservation, climate change, quiet gateway communities and high-quality recreation experiences, then these exploding visitor numbers are a mighty disaster.

Even the tourism dollar zealots agree that the National Parks are suffering under the mob of visitors. Their solution: Push the crowds toward other national monuments and state parks, and thereby spread the same problems to areas never designed to absorb such visitation. They even have a philosophy for it: “a perpetual visitor economy.” And hokey campaign term for it: “The Red Emerald Strategic Plan.”

Who pays for all of this tourism advertising? We do. When you do a tourist thing like rent a car, book a hotel room or pay sales tax on 21 tourism-related industries, you pay into a fund that goes to the Utah Office of Tourism to encourage even more people to do the same thing. Since 2005, it has spent more than $100 million marketing Utah. That’s correct: $100 million.

Not only is the tourism promotion relentless, it’s often false advertising. Visit Utah.com’s Lake Powell homepage includes a beautiful photo of a brimming full Lake Powell instead of the two-thirds empty, bathtub-ringed reservoir that suffers from climate change and overuse. Their boating guide landing page does the same thing with an old photo. The Lake Powell Pipeline Organization promotes the same environmental mirage with a Lake Powell photo that nobody under the age of 30 will ever see in person. And Utah’s State Park’s webpage displays several once Great Salt Lake photos long before it teetered on the edge of biological collapse surrounded by toxic dust flats.

Despite a mighty long list of problems with the Mighty 5 campaign, it’s not going away. In fact, the Utah Office of Tourism has now copywritten Forever Mighty®. You can even indulge in Forever Mighty swag and logos. And despite a lot of sustainable, ethical and resilient rhetoric on their snazzy website, on nearly every page is the promotion of “growth.”

With endless growth in mind, you better make your recreation reservations soon.

Eric C. Ewert is a professor in and chair of Weber State University’s Department of Geography, Environment & Sustainability. His current research and teaching interests lie in environmental studies, the American West, population, historical and economic geography and geospatial technologies. Views are the opinion of the author, and in no way represent Weber State University.

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