Cache County Executive/Surveyor candidate: David Zook
Q: What makes you stand out from other candidates and why should people vote for you?
A: I love Cache Valley. I love the people, and I love the place. The reason why I want to serve as county executive is because I love the things that make our community great. I want to protect them, I want to preserve them, and I want to accentuate them. I want to keep our community safe. I want to keep our roads flowing well. I want to preserve our farms, our open space water. I want to make sure that everybody has a good job, including especially the students here at university when they graduate, and I want to make sure that we’re taking care of people in need.
I actually spoke last week at an event here on campus, and I told the students there, I said, ‘You might hear from some of your professors that you’ll have to leave Cache Valley if you want to find a good job after college.’ And I said, ‘That’s not true.’ There are plenty of good jobs here in our community, and we want the students to stay here. We have so many smart, well-trained, well-educated students who are creative and full of energy, and we need them in our economy. We have had, over the last year, times when our unemployment rate has dropped as low as 1%. Historically, economists say that 5% is full unemployment, or full employment. And we’ve been down as low as 1%. And at the point where we were that low, and we’re still in the ones, we still have around 5,000 job openings available in our community. Of course, not all of those are our jobs for people with a bachelor’s or a master’s degree, but a lot of them are, and increasingly, we have more high-level positions and a higher level pay for educated members of our workforce.
Q: If you aren’t elected, how will you still be involved and still serve the community?
A: Well, I’ve been very involved in serving here in the community. I’ve only been in elected office for about a year and a half, and I’ve always been involved in our community. I’ve served in a number of places in our community over the years. I was on the planning commission for Hyde Park. For many years, I served on the board of directors for The Family Place. I’ve served there for more than a decade. I’ve served on the board of directors for the Chamber of Commerce for more than a decade. And I’ve, I’ve been involved in some other efforts that, organizations that I created, and in the community. One of those is the Cache Valley Economic Development Alliance. And that’s an organization I created while I was serving as chairman of the Chamber of Commerce board. So, I have a long history of being involved in the community, and I’ll continue to be involved in this community, no matter what, because I love our community, and I want to make it better.
Q: What do you think is the most important responsibility of your current and hopeful position in the future? And how will you do your best to manage that?
A: There are several very important responsibilities associated with this position. One of those is being the leader for the 400 employees we have working for the county, and it’s important in that role to lead them in a way that helps them to do their best to serve our residents. But I also serve in several other important roles. By virtue of my position as county executive, including on the boards of directors of the Bear River Health Department, Bear River Mental Health and Bear River Association of Governments. And each of those three organizations provides essential services to people in need, so helping and supporting those organizations is also very critical to the well-being of many members of our community.
I’ll give you an example of one project I’m working on right now with Bear River Mental Health. So, I’m on their board of directors. They’re essentially our mental health department for the county. But we partner with our neighboring counties, Box Elder County and Rich County, and the three of us counties work together to form one mental health department that all, that serves all three counties. So, the board of directors is composed of elected officials and citizens from all three counties. So, one project we’re working on right now with Bear River Mental Health is we’re working on establishing a receiving center. And the receiving center is a missing link right now in our mental health system. So, for example, right now, if you, if you had a medical emergency, just a traditional medical emergency, you have a lot of different things that you could do to seek help. Everything from calling 911 to have an ambulance come out, go into the emergency room, go into the hospital. We have a very well-developed continuum of care for our, for traditional health care system. But when it comes to mental health, we have some missing links. And we’ve been working on filling in those missing links over the last year. We’ve, we’ve filled in a couple of them. One of them is we have the equivalent 911 now for mental health, 988, which started in July. Also, within the last year we, we’ve established essentially the paramedics for mental health. It’s called the mobile crisis outreach team. And so that’s a new thing that we’ve, that we’ve filled in the gap.
The next level is the emergency room. We don’t have that — we don’t have an emergency room for people struggling with mental health emergencies. All we have is the traditional emergency room. A traditional emergency room is great for people who got in a car accident or have a heart attack or a stroke or broken bone, something like that. That’s what those are designed for, and they do a great job with that type of thing. But they were not designed to help people dealing with a mental health emergency. But that’s what a receiving center is. A receiving center is a facility that is designed specifically to help people with mental health crisis, crises, and, and get them to help immediately. The data and the experience in communities who have receiving centers shows much better outcomes for people who are dealing with things like suicidal ideation, for example.
Q: What do you hope to change or accomplish if elected?
A: Well, I’m working on a few things right now that I will continue working on. One of those is fixing our roads. As anyone has noticed, if they’ve driven around on our roads, they’re getting very crowded. Our cities and our county and our state could do a lot more to improve our transportation situation. And I’ve been working on that over the past year. Just last year alone, I was part of efforts to secure more than $72 million in road funds for local projects, including 52 million of that was specifically for Main Street. And then the other 20 million was, was money that was allocated to about 18 different projects in 13 different communities. So that’s, that’s a big one that I’m going to be working on.
Something else I’m working on right now is preserving open space. You may have noticed Prop 1 that’s on the ballot. And that’s something that I’ve been working to get before the voters to see if the voters want to do something about preserving open space. I’ve heard a lot of our citizens say that they’re concerned about that, and we’ll find out how many of them want to actually pay a little bit of it. Also, working on both —the resource center response I guess you could use as a response to this question, because that’s one of the big ones I’m working on.
But another thing I’m working on is improving, improving the level of customer service that our organization provides to the public. I’m really big on customer service, and I think everyone loves good customer service. Whether you’re going to a restaurant or a store or a government office, you want good customer service; you want to be treated with respect, want to be given the best level of service that you deserve. And that’s something that I’ve been working on with our organization to help improve service. One of those specifically that I’m working on is the DMV. We have Department of Motor Vehicles, and they sometimes have long lines, and I want to get people in and out of there faster and allow people to do, encourage people to do, receive those services online in more convenient way. So those, those are the types of things that we’re working on.
I have a lot of energy. Some people say I’m a little hyper because I’m constantly working on something. For example, another one of the projects I’m working on right now is I’m forming a task force to look at our gas prices to find out why our gas prices and Cache Valley are 20 to 50 cents more per gallon than just right on the other side of the mountain and Brigham City. Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to anyone. I haven’t found anyone who can explain to me why that’s the case. And that’s why we’re going to investigate that; we’re going to find out what’s going on and why we’re getting ripped off up here in Cache. We, we need to get to the bottom of that. So that’s one of the things we’re working on.
I’ve formed several groups over the past year and a half to look at issues, and this is my approach to leadership. I recognize that I do not have all the answers. I am not the expert in every area out there, but we have plenty of smart people in our community who are. So, the first task force that I called together: I called together emergency task force to deal with the suicide epidemic. We brought together several experts within the mental health fields and we, we looked at what we could do to address the mental health crisis we’ve been having. As a result of that, we’ve done two different mental health and suicide prevention walks. We’ve done two different mental health and suicide prevention concerts with Alex Boyé, and a number of other smaller educational events for people.
I put together a housing crisis task force. I brought together 50 experts on housing to look at our housing and why it’s so expensive and what we can do to, to address that and change that. And we’re now taking our, the results of our housing crisis task force. We’re taking to every city council, every school. I took it to Washington, D.C. and shared it with our entire federal delegation. And we’re sharing the results so that people can start implementing recommendations of our task force. That task force was so successful that it’s now being replicated across the state, that the state legislature provided some funds to the Utah Land Use Institute, and they are now repeating what we did here in Cache County across the entire state to look at the housing crisis in other communities.
And then the Open Space Task Force is another one that I formed and brought several good citizens together, including farmers and nature lovers and outdoor recreation lists, and brought them all together to talk about how we can work together to preserve our open space. And the result of that group is the bomb that’s on the ballot this this fall. So that’s the kind of thing I’ve been doing. And that’s the kind of thing I’m going to continue to do is I’m going to bring good, smart people together to tackle the many problems and challenges that are facing our citizens, whether it’s gas prices, or mental health, or housing or open space preservation. I know that if we pull together, if we bring the right minds to the table, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.
Q: Where’s your favorite spot to get pizza in Cache Valley?
A: Factory Pizzeria.
-Alivia.Hadfield@usu.edu
Featured photo by Claire Ott