Questions Every Utah Candidate Should Answer

Major PID bonds, by location

• Wasatch County (MIDA Cormont PID, Deer Valley area) — $139.1 million in bonds issued.
• Wasatch County (MIDA Mountain Village PID, Deer Valley East Village) — bond authorization increased from $90 million to $150 million, with roughly $120 million expected to actually be issued.
• Washington County (Black Desert PID, St. George area) — special assessment bonds authorized up to $234.87 million.
• Salt Lake area (Utah Inland Port Authority's Crossroads PID) — $150 million in tax-differential bonds sold.
• Summit County (Wohali PID Nos. 1 and 2, near Coalville) — more than $30 million issued by the districts; the underlying resort's total debt grew past $100 million before its August 2025 bankruptcy filing.
• Weber County (Promontory Commerce Center PID) — $25.9 million bond approved by the County Commission, March 3, 2026.
• Weber County (Nordic Village PID, Ogden Valley) — $39.38 million bond issued.

Tax increases already proposed or approved

• Weber County — a new 0.20% countywide sales tax ("the fifth-fifth"), approved, generating an estimated $13.1 million a year.
• Davis County — an additional 0.20% transportation sales tax, incentivized by 2026 state legislation (S.B. 242), projected to generate roughly $15.98 million a year, an estimated $41.62 per resident annually.
• Ogden Valley City — a 512.6% property tax increase, raising the bill on the area's average home from $104.85 to $640.51 a year.
• Heber City — a 2026 Truth in Taxation increase adding an estimated $16 a year to the average $850,000 home's tax bill.
• Weber Basin Water Conservancy District — a proposed 6.99% rate increase, moving through Truth in Taxation as of this cycle.

Reform that almost passed

• H.B. 422 (2026), "Public Infrastructure Districts Amendments" — would have required real PID-trustee conflict-of-interest disclosure with mandatory public posting, and created Utah's first statutory PID dissolution procedure. An earlier version also required real estate agents to disclose PID status to buyers before a sale; that provision was dropped in the 3rd substitute. Passed the House 66-1-8 and a Senate committee 5-0-2 — then died without a Senate floor vote, struck at 11:59pm on the session's final night, the same mechanism documented elsewhere on this page.

• S.B. 258 (2024) — lets as few as three landowners in a rural area form their own "preliminary municipality," bypassing the county's own planning and zoning authority over that land entirely.
• H.B. 37 (2025) — lowered the population threshold to incorporate as a town from 100 to 75 people, amending the same underlying statute S.B. 258 depends on (a separate, untouched bar in the same law means the change had little practical effect on its own, but it's part of the same statutory apparatus).
• S.B. 284 (2026) — absorbed a separate bill that had died on its own, then grew through several retitlings into "Local Land and Water Modifications," touching planning-commission authority, municipal-incorporation feasibility requests, and infrastructure-assurance accounts statewide.
• H.B. 492 (2026) — created a $100 million state housing infrastructure fund and board, positioning state government, not local officials, over a major new pool of housing-development money.
• S.B. 337 (2025) — would have created a single statewide "Beehive Development Agency" with broad authority over local development decisions; died without ever reaching a Senate floor vote.
• Utah Code §17-79-306 (not a new bill, a standing statute) — already defines state trust land as exempt from county and municipal zoning jurisdiction, the legal basis SITLA has cited to say it can bypass local zoning entirely.

• Election Hive LLC — over $1.54 million processed through this single campaign-management firm in 2024 alone, on behalf of clients including Gov. Spencer Cox's campaign, Attorney General Derek Brown, and dozens of state legislators.
• Utah Bankers Association — $641,259.45 given out to candidates and committees, 2018–2026.
• Northern Wasatch Association of Realtors (NWAOR) — $562,278.02 given out to 184 recipients, 2018–2026, funded entirely by dues money passed down from its state and national parent associations.
• Gershon Barnett, an individual donor from Monsey, NY — $429,500 given directly to Utah candidates and committees, 2022–2026.
• Utahns for Balanced Government — $370,350 given out, 2023–2026, itself funded by $360,000 from other PACs and donors, including $100,000 from the Utah Bankers Association that was returned in full the same day it was reported.
• "Utah Legacy Endowed Fund" — over $280,000 given to Count My Vote's PAC in 2025–2026 alone; the fund is owned by an LLC whose members are Michael O. Leavitt and Gail Miller.
• Meta Platforms' "Forge the Future Project" — $270,000 in independent expenditures deployed to two Utah candidates in a single day in 2026.
• Zions Bancorporation PAC — $230,998 raised from 12,293 employee payroll-deduction contributions.
• Torus, Inc. — $151,041.98 given across four checks, 2022–2025, exclusively to one recipient, Gov. Spencer Cox.
• Gail Miller, personally — $140,500 given directly to Count My Vote's PAC across three separate years, 2022–2024, separate from her ownership stake in the fund above.

These are the ten largest fully documented figures in our own reporting to date — not a claim that no larger, undocumented giving exists elsewhere in Utah politics. Figures mix outbound totals, single donors, and money processed by a consulting firm; each is labeled with what it represents and the years it covers.

• Sharon Bolos, Weber County Commissioner (Seat B) — her COI form did not list her brother Bryan Arrington's employment at Nilson Homes. She subsequently seconded or championed at least two Nilson Homes development votes (a 115-unit expansion in 2024, a later 275-unit expansion) with no disclosure entered in the minutes either time.
• Erik Rowland, Wasatch County Council (Seat C) and MIDA board — checked "I have no conflict of interest to report" on his county disclosure form, leaving all three detail lines blank, despite sitting on MIDA's main board plus three subsidiary PID boards and at least eight other confirmed entities and positions (including a CAMS board seat and three separate business entities) absent from that same form. He also never filed any disclosure at all for a separate county board he sits on, the Wasatch Open Lands Board.
• Gage Froerer, Weber County Commissioner — his 2025 and 2026 disclosure forms both omit his trusteeship on the Weber Housing Authority, even though that Authority paid his family's companies $19,623 over the period the forms cover, and even though the potential conflict was openly discussed at the public 2019 meeting that appointed him to the board.
• Erik Craythorne, 2026 candidate for House District 13 — his COI form's board-seat item lists one unpaid board seat, but not his role as President and Trustee of Bennett Legacy Farms Homeowners Association — the HOA for a subdivision his own company is actively building and selling homes in.
• Jon Beesley, 2026 candidate for Weber County Commission (Seat B) — left the employer field blank on his 2021 Plain City mayoral disclosure while employed by Lync Construction; his 2025 county candidate disclosure separately omitted his Lync income, his mayoral salary, a water-district board seat, and left the spousal-information section blank.
• Katrina Gibson, 2026 candidate for Weber County Commission (Seat A) — her disclosure form listed only one entity, a restaurant, with every other line marked N/A or left blank, despite being an active registered lobbyist the same day she signed the form (she canceled that registration six days later) and serving as CFO/Treasurer of a political action committee.
• Vance Smith, 2026 candidate for Box Elder County Commission (Seat A) — his disclosure form lists an entity as currently active that had lapsed four months before he signed the form, and lists another entity as his own that is registered to his wife.
• Mark Shepherd, MIDA board member and Clearfield Mayor — his city disclosure form's "Leadership Position or Board of Directors" field, which he used in January 2025 to list a national housing-industry lobbying chairmanship, simply read "N/A" in January 2026 — the same year he held a governor-appointed seat on the MIDA board, a seat that has never appeared on either year's form.
• Rachel Kahler, 2026 candidate for Wasatch County Council (Seat A) — checked "I have no conflict of interest to report" on her county disclosure form, leaving all three detail lines blank, despite being Executive Director of a nonprofit paid $39,900 a year under a Heber City contract, a director of a separate nonprofit festival organization, and manager of an LLC whose own state filing describes its purpose as acquiring and managing real estate investments. Her own campaign materials separately name two more board seats — a special service district and a public utility board — that also never appear on that same disclosure form.

Read the full disclosure-gap pattern, "The Blank Box" →
Read the full Weber Housing Authority payments piece →

Weber County's own 2026 "5th‑5th" sales tax increase is the clearest documented case. Weber County Hive's own reporting on it — "A Public Vote, but No Vote by the Public" — includes a proportional bar chart comparing the State of Utah's own $1.2 billion in general obligation debt against the $5.267 billion statewide total in PID debt, and a line chart tracking Ogden Valley home prices against the statewide income-tax-rate index since 2018, showing the two moving in opposite directions.

• Two different official figures for the same number, never reconciled. Weber County's own on-record statements give two different dollar figures for the county's own share of the new sales tax revenue — one around $9.8 million, another around $2–3 million — with no public document explaining the gap.
• The shortfall is scattered across separate funds, not stated as one total. Weber County's own Tentative Budget shows a Transportation Development Fund shortfall of $15.9 million, a Capital Projects Fund shortfall of $7.8 million, a RAMP Fund shortfall of $6.6 million, an already-negative Termination Pool, and a $1.26 million Impact Fees Fund shortfall — each in a different line of a different fund, in a budget document most residents will never open.
• A $267 million unfunded capital wish list sits behind the new tax, never presented to residents as a single number tied to the tax increase itself.
• The tax was structured specifically to avoid Truth in Taxation. Because it's a sales tax increase rather than a property tax rate increase, it never triggered Utah's notice-and-hearing requirement — the same disclosure and public-comment process a direct property tax increase would have required.

Read "A Public Vote, but No Vote by the Public," with the full charts →

What Weber County has spent and deployed

• Ogden City pays roughly $123,000 a year to operate its Flock camera grid — the largest municipal Flock spend documented anywhere in Utah.
• Weber County Sheriff's Office holds its own separate, direct contract with Flock — 10 cameras, $30,000 a year, $60,000 over the first two-year term.
• Plain City approved up to six cameras in a September 2021 council vote with no documented public notice or comment period, after a single question from one council member.
• North Ogden converted its cameras from a trial to a permanent purchase in April 2023 — the same month the city received a $22,000 federal grant for 22 body-worn cameras.
• Weber County's own Sheriff's Lieutenant told a city council in 2021 that an "association of communities" in the county was already linked to the same system — on the record evidence that these were coordinated rollouts, not independent city-by-city decisions.
• Utah's own penalty statute for license-plate-data misuse is a Class B misdemeanor requiring a "knowing or intentional" violation — and no prosecution under that specific statute has been identified anywhere in the state, even as the cases below show what real misuse looks like elsewhere.

Documented misuse, by state

• Wisconsin (Milwaukee) — Officer Josue Ayala ran 179 unauthorized searches over about two months, tracking a romantic partner 124 times and her ex-partner 55 times. The department's own audit system never caught it; the victim discovered it herself using a public lookup tool. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, was sentenced to one year of probation and a $500 fine, and was required to resign. The internal-affairs detective assigned to investigate him, Tehrangi Chapman, was separately found to have used the same system to track someone himself and to have secretly placed a GPS tracker on that person's car; he was charged with felony misconduct in public office.
• California (Costa Mesa) — Officer Robert Jay Josett used Flock and a separate law enforcement database to locate his mistress, her new boyfriend, and his own wife. After the department placed him on leave and opened an investigation, he continued logging into Flock for six more months, using it to find his mistress's new boyfriend's home address. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts and was sentenced to three years of probation, a 52-week domestic violence program, and nine months on a GPS ankle monitor.
• Georgia — officers in Albany were arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for license-plate-data misuse; separately, a Flock vice president was found to have accessed a camera positioned inside a children's gymnastics room in Dunwoody, a misuse case originating on the company's own side rather than a police department's.
• Utah (Weber County) — residents have reported to The Weber County Hive that a driver was ticketed for speeding they had not committed, because the citation went to the vehicle's registered owner rather than the actual driver, and that a separate resident was nearly jailed based solely on Flock camera data before their own dashcam footage cleared them. These accounts have not yet been independently confirmed against a named case file or court record.

A bill that would have changed this — and how it died

• H.B. 468 (2025) would have imposed a 150-day data retention cap, banned facial recognition use, required a warrant before accessing a private camera's data, and mandated independent audits. It passed the House 64-2 and a Senate committee 6-0-2 — overwhelming, near-unanimous support at every recorded stage — then died at 11:59pm on the session's final night via the same procedural enacting-clause strike already documented for other bills on this page, with no recorded floor vote on the kill itself.
• S.B. 250 (2026) was introduced as a bill to prohibit certain surveillance camera networks outright. Its substitute replaced that prohibition with a permitting framework instead — the version that passed allows continued deployment under an "active investigation" standard, a 9-month retention period, and agency-to-agency data sharing by agreement.

• Joint Informal Executive & Legislative Working Group (H.B. 373, 2026) — environmental policy, direct Senate President/Speaker appointees.
• Critical Minerals Council (S.B. 254, 2026) — sets state mining-extraction strategy and "streamlined" permitting.
• Utah Energy Infrastructure Service District Board (H.B. 514, 2026) — financing authority for energy infrastructure.
• Great Salt Lake Commissioner's Office & Advisory Committee (H.B. 491, 2023) — water oversight coordination.
• Utah Privacy Commission & Office of Data Privacy (S.B. 231/H.B. 444, 2023–2025) — statewide data-privacy policy.
• Economic Development Coordinating Council (H.B. 475, 2026) — state-level business recruitment and workforce policy.
• Medicaid Inspector General Advisory Board (S.B. 147, 2026).
• Prosecutor Conduct Commission (S.B. 318, 2025).
• Cybersecurity Commission, expanded mandate (S.B. 123, 2026).
• Utah Water Ways (H.B. 62, 2023–2024) — chaired by a Larry H. Miller Co. executive, seats water conservancy districts and Zions Bank.

This is in addition to longer-standing appointed bodies already tracked in our reporting — MIDA, the Utah Inland Port Authority, the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, the Federalism Commission, and the Great Salt Lake Trust Council among them.

• H.B. 491 (2023), "Great Salt Lake Commissioner Act" — framed as lake protection; carved water rights out of the Commissioner's authority and added a records exemption. The sponsor's own company got water rights approved under that exemption 56 days later.
• S.B. 2001 (2019 Special Session), "Tax Restructuring Revisions" — raised the sales tax on groceries nearly threefold, paired with an income tax cut. The legislature repealed its own bill before a citizen referendum against it could reach the ballot.
• H.B. 60 (2026), "Water Rights Amendments" — narrowed the grounds for denying a water application right before a major, heavily-protested application was refiled under the new, narrower standard.
• H.B. 236 (2026), "Truth in Taxation Amendments" — the original version required a taxing entity to prove it could function without a proposed tax increase before requesting one. That requirement was quietly removed between substitutes.
• H.B. 125 / H.B. 157 (2026) — water-litigation funding was stripped from one bill, reinserted into an unrelated bill, then had its $5 million appropriation pulled again six hours later.
• H.B. 273 (2026) — the classroom-technology standard was weakened by floor amendment from "designed specifically for instructional use" to "demonstrated to have significant educational value," opening the door to general-purpose tools.
• H.B. 17 (2026), "Public Infrastructure District Meeting Amendments" — replaced a narrow meeting-location exception with a broader one allowing PID meetings anywhere within the much larger entity that created the district.
• S.B. 235 (2026) — introduced as an Attorney General pay raise; after a change of both sponsor and title, signed into law as a Governor salary increase instead, with the original AG provision dropped.
• H.C.R. 9 (2026) — introduced as a resolution about the national debt; its entire text was struck and replaced with an unrelated resolution about the Great Salt Lake, under the same bill number and sponsors.

Read "Bills That Did the Opposite," with the full tracker →

• Speaker Mike Schultz — besides his legislative pay, his own COI disclosure lists roughly two dozen business entities: apartment complexes, two hotels, an aviation company, and multiple ranching operations.
• Weber County Commissioner Gage Froerer — earned $232,465 in county compensation in 2025 while his family's real estate and property-management companies separately received $19,623 from the county's own Housing Authority, a board he sits on.
• Heber City Manager Matt Brower — total compensation rose from $179,034 (2022) to $286,730 (2025), a 60% increase over three years, alongside a contract requiring a third-party investigation before he could be fired "with cause," and severance if let go without one.
• Sen. Kirk Cullimore — alongside his Senate pay, runs Titan Legal, described in this reporting as one of Utah's largest eviction law firms.

None of this is alleged to be illegal — outside income and business ownership are broadly legal for Utah officeholders. The question is simply whether the collective benefits (pensions, severance protections, compensation growth) built into these public roles are proportionate, and who they actually serve.

Who's actually putting water back

• The LDS Church — made the largest permanent water-rights donation to the lake on record.
• Rio Tinto Kennecott, Central Utah Water Conservancy District, and Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District — each confirmed as real water-transaction or funding partners in the Trust's own year-end accounting.
• The Trust itself (a National Audubon Society/Nature Conservancy partnership) — has secured real acre-feet of water, but at a slow pace: only about $7.24 million of its $40 million allocation was actually spent in its first three years, roughly 18%.

Who should be, but whose own record complicates it

• Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed — the state's own lake-protection office — personally testified in favor of a 2026 bill that narrowed the public's standing to protest new water-rights applications near the lake.
• Former Rep. Timothy D. Hawkes — created the original Great Salt Lake Account in 2022, then, after leaving office, testified for its expansion while serving as counsel to the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative, and was appointed to the Trust Advisory Council the same year.

Bills that said "save the lake" and did something else

• H.B. 491 (2023), "Great Salt Lake Commissioner Act" — framed as lake protection; carved water rights out of the Commissioner's own authority and, in the same bill, cut the GSL Account's appropriation from $40 million to $10 million.
• H.B. 60 (2026), "Water Rights Amendments" — narrowed the standard for denying a water-rights application, removing the exact grounds used to protest a major application the same session — supported on the record by the lake's own Commissioner.
• H.C.R. 9 (2026) — introduced as a resolution about the national debt; its entire text was struck and replaced with a resolution "addressing the Great Salt Lake" under the same bill number, a messaging vehicle rather than a funding or policy mechanism.

• Utah's state lawsuit (ongoing) — challenged Biden's 2021 restoration of the monument boundaries, keeping the question in active litigation rather than settled.
• 10th Circuit Court ruling (June 2026) — reversed an earlier dismissal and held that monument designations can be challenged in court, opening the legal door the eventual reduction walked through.
• Congressional Review Act attempt (Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, June 2026) — tried to undo the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan directly; the effort lapsed after missing a Senate deadline, but signaled sustained federal pressure.
• "Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act" (S. 220 / H.R. 521, Lee/Maloy) — proposed federal bill that would repeal a president's Antiquities Act authority to create new monuments going forward; not yet passed.
• July 14, 2026 executive proclamations — the actual instrument that cut both monuments by roughly 90% and terminated the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Commission, signed behind closed doors with no advance public notice.

This is federal and legal-track action, not a Utah state bill — there's no dedicated Weber County Hive repo page for this topic yet to link to here, unlike the other questions on this page.

Confirmed

• Grand Staircase-Escalante contains an estimated 62 billion tons of coal, valued at more than $212 billion, on the Kaiparowits Plateau — named directly in the reduction proclamation as a reason for the boundary change.
• Bears Ears contains substantial uranium and vanadium deposits, also named directly in its own proclamation.
• The Velvet-Wood uranium-vanadium mine (San Juan County, the same region) was approved by Interior/BLM under an accelerated 14-day federal environmental review, tied to a national energy emergency declaration — a concrete, already-approved example of expedited mining permitting in this exact area.
• S.B. 254 (2026), Utah's own Critical Minerals Council, creates a parallel state fast-track permitting framework for mining that runs on the same timeline and the same "streamlined pathway" concept as a companion federal bill, H.R. 1501.
• H.B. 249 (2025) created Utah's official "Nuclear Consortium" — a state body of named legislators, regulators, and business leaders directing nuclear strategy and funding. First met October 2025; members include Sen. Scott Sandall, Rep. Colin Jack, the Office of Energy Development's director, the DEQ director, and Idaho National Lab's Dr. Laura Nelson.
• H.B. 78 (2026) created a new state Nuclear Energy Regulatory Office — and a Senate amendment removed the words "including safety measures" from what that office is required to report on.

A connection under investigation, not yet confirmed

• Separate reporting is tracking whether Bears Ears-area uranium feeding the existing White Mesa Mill functions as the "front end" of a supply chain whose "back end" is a proposed nuclear-fuel reprocessing campus in Brigham City/Box Elder County, backed by a $40 million state appropriation and requiring an estimated 620 million gallons of water a year. This is a hypothesis under active reporting, not a confirmed fact — no contract, filing, or on-record statement has yet tied the two together directly, and it's presented here only as a pattern worth watching, not a claim.
• The same state development authority framework (MIDA) already documented elsewhere on this page as able to override local zoning is the mechanism that would let a project like the Brigham City facility proceed regardless of municipal objection.