By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Midway through the 2025 session of the Utah state legislature, freshman Rep. Logan Monson called into the KOAL newsroom to discuss his first year on the hill, his legislation working its way through the house, and what may lay ahead in the remainder of the session.

“Things are good. It’s a fast-paced, always moving learning process, but being engaged enough to where we’re making a difference on this first year,” explained Monson of the legislative experience,” It’s insanely busy. Early mornings, long days, lots of good work happening for rural Utah and just Utah in general.”

Recently, Rep. Monson presented his first piece of legislation to the House of Representatives, HB275 or the First Responder Volunteer Tax Credit. When asked what it’s like to present a bill to the house, he replied,” You have a decent idea as to how things will be taken. There’s a process in getting a bill through, and it takes time and lots of communication. But actually presenting it on the floor is kind of the main thing where everyone gets to see. You get to present your argument for why this bill is good. And then you don’t know what questions will come your way. So, preparing in a way that you can present the bill and articulate what is happening while answering questions that you don’t know will come your way is slightly stressful. But it’s a good experience, too.”

With the 2025 general session at its midway point, Monson discussed the biggest lesson he’s learned: ” I think the biggest lesson for me so far is that relationships matter. And that’s not with my colleagues directly. That’s an important piece, and it’s very important to have good relationships with those that you’re working with. But relationships from constituents, being engaged, answering phone calls, keeping up on emails, that’s important to me.” He added,” And it’s a lesson that I have grown to appreciate that people matter, experiences matter, perspective matters. And I’ll do my best to keep doing that.”

Since our last conversation with Rep. Monson, he has introduced two new bills to the House. The first is HB421, or the Grazing Amendments. “So this has kind of been a work in progress for a long time. And it’s not just me that’s been doing it. There are lots of representatives and commissioners and departments within the state, and even the Governor’s office has been engaged in working on this piece of legislation.”

He continued to explain,” What it is, is it’s saying that if there’s a grazing allotment that’s up for sale or someone’s acquiring it, that if the conservation funds that the Division of Wildlife have or manage if they’re going to use those conservation funds for acquiring a grazing allotment, it has to be approved through the Division of Natural Resources and the Department of Ag. The biggest and most important piece is the local land use authority, which is going to be your county commissioners. So we’re putting control back at a local level of where these allotments are being acquired or purchased because we want to keep them in grazing allotments. We want grazing to happen. We support it. And the local county commissioners do, too. So that’s kind of the background on that.”

The other bill Monson wants to implement is HB482, which repeals reporting requirements related to the Department of Health and Human. Dealing with the medical field, this falls into Monson’s personal experiences as a health care professional,” this one is a cleanup bill in a sense of there’s some reporting requirements that previous bills have held. And those reporting requirements are either expired. So we’re cleaning them up and getting rid of them so that they’re not continually reporting on things that aren’t required. Or there are times when a reporting requirement might be a little too much for a specific agency. So it kind of looks at those. There’s only a handful of them. This kind of happens every year, but I was the one to run it this year.”

In closing, the Representative shared,” be engaged, be in contact with your representative, your senator, your delegation in whatever way that looks like for you, even at a city level, because it matters. I’m committed to being engaged, and we’re not going to agree all the time, but we’ll still talk it out and find compromises.”

To keep up with Rep. Monson, you can visit his website votemonson.com.

*Photo Courtesy of the Utah House of Representatives