By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News | Photo courtesy of the Utah House of Representatives

Following an exciting opening week on Utah’s Capitol Hill, which saw a plethora of bills begin to move through the government machine and an address from Gov. Spencer Cox, Rep. Christine Watkins joined the KOAL newsroom to discuss what’s been happening in the state legislature.

Opening our discussion, Watkins spoke about several procedural changes that have made the beginning of the session stand out,” The last couple of sessions, our first week, even into the second week, we would have committee meetings canceled because they didn’t have bills ready. And then, of course, you get to the last two weeks, and you’re desperately trying to get some good bills passed and in through committees. And it was like, why did we not do this at the beginning?”

She continued,” So we had a change in leadership … And as they were – this is the Republican side – and as they were reaching out to us and saying, ‘Vote for me, vote for me,’ amazingly enough, we were all saying the same thing. If you get elected to our leadership, we want to start literally from day one. Don’t waste our time up here. We have too much to do. And we have interim meetings. We have bills ready to go. No excuse. And they listened to us. We had a real change in leadership because we felt like we needed that change. And it’s been so refreshing.”

Because of these changes, Watkins has already been able to push HB61 to the Senate, HB75 to the House floor and HB105 to the House Judiciary Committee.

Switching gears, Watkins spoke on her role as the house chair of the Economic and Community Development Appropriations Subcommittee, which, due to federal cuts from the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ is tasked with guiding state organizations and departments in making five percent cuts to their programs.

“We didn’t realize this cut was coming. And even though the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ passed in July, we didn’t realize all the ramifications that would come down on us as a state. So now we have this, and so in our committee, our staff has already suggested 5%, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the organization and the particular program, to achieve that goal.”

Watkins added,” What we said last week to everyone was, if you don’t like what we’ve chosen to cut, then when you come to us in committee, you tell us where you can make the cuts, and it does not affect you as much … And that’s what we want. I had someone here talking about SNAP, which is food stamps. The average state is going to have to take on from the federal government an additional $265 million to keep its food stamps program going. Because we’ve been so responsible in what we do here in Utah, we only have a $13 million addition that we have to now take on. So it’s going to be a little bit easier for us than a whole lot of other states, but it’s still a little painful.”

These decisions come at a time when budget reductions are again a focus of the state, particularly in higher education, which is facing its third consecutive year of budget cuts. The latest proposed cut would be 5% of the nearly $1.9 billion total that the state allocates for public higher education.

Watkins dove deeper, explaining what the process of making cuts looks like for the committee,” So as we listen to these in our committees, these organizations come to us and say, ‘This is what we want to cut, this is what we can do.’ We have a ranking system with our committee members. And so we all listen to it, and they decide what they feel is important and stuff … We look at what they rank as the most important to keep, the least important, and what we can cut. And then we meet as chairs, finalize that budget, and then we have to turn it over to the executive appropriations.”

Our penultimate topic of conversation saw Watkins discussing the recent State of the State address delivered by Gov. Spencer Cox,” It was such a positive speech. He told some fun stories of things that happened as recently as 75 years ago … One of his things is just being kind and being a good person. We have examples across the nation of leaders encouraging people not to be that way. To me, I’m very grateful to live in Utah and to have the kind of leadership that we’ve always had. Saying, volunteer and take care of each other and be responsible in your communities. To me, that’s really important. I’m all about community. That’s become my real focus: taking care of each other and creating strong communities. If we have good, healthy communities, we have good, healthy families; everyone can be happy and be glad they’re here.”

Closing our conversation, Watkins stated,” I just want you to know, we are working really hard to keep our state running efficiently, effectively, and we think about everybody all the time. I appreciate the opportunity to serve you.”

To keep up with all the action in the state legislature, visit le.utah.gov.