The Utah Legislature is set to begin on January 17 and Castle Country Radio was able to sit down with Representative Christine Watkins to see what items may be on the agenda this year.

There has been a change to our state flag to help identify it easier. “So they’ve been working on it and they had the state involved as far as planning, creating this. If you go online and just google it, you’ll see that new flag. Some people like it, some people don’t. I had a conversation over the weekend with one of the Senators that’s really pushing this, and he showed me a lot of flags and stuff but they’re just trying to make it so that we have a brand,” said Representative Watkins. The old flag will still be used for ceremonies so it’s not completely gone. She has received a lot of comments about the new flag and the majority of people from our area would like to stay with the old flag. She stated that she plans to conduct a survey for people to complete to get a good measure on what people’s thoughts are.

Education vouchers came up in the session last year but didn’t go through because it need to be fine-tuned and specifics needed to be made to the bill. “What this bill would do is create a pot of money that home-schoolers could access, that individual’s family – every child would have so much money attached to that child, and if I wanted my child to be tested outside of the district, I could use that money to do that. But I could also just say to the school district you have that money for my child, spend that,” said Representative Watkins. This is kind of a new movement in the nation, this is where we got our charter schools from. This was really controversial last year and it was defeated. It was originally was called the HOPE Scholarship and it’s not known if that is what it will be called again this year. But plan on hearing more about this in the 2023 legislative meetings.

Representative Watkins hopes that this year there will be some money set aside to make some safety changes to Highway 6. She made a call to UDOT regarding some safety issues on Highway 6 and they have promised to make some changes to the road at Soldier Summit and by the new Maverick gas station in Helper. “What they’re going to do is and its risen to the top, it just takes some time they’re going to put some barriers so that people can’t cross into the other lane that will be up there at the Summit. Then at the same time, he told me where Maverick is being built outside of Helper, it’s kind of an odd place, its going to cause some driving issues, they’re also going to put some barriers out there,” stated Watkins. She hopes that by making these changes the state will also find more ways to make Highway 6 safe to travel.