State House 3 candidate: Patrick Belmont
Q: What makes you stand out from other candidates? Why should people vote for you?
A: Well, I am a scientist who studies water, climate and agriculture. And those are three of the biggest issues our state is facing right now. So, we have a whole lot of water problems, as probably a lot of people who will be reading this already be aware. And we don’t have a single legislator who has any water background. Not a single one in a state that depends so much on water for our economy, for our quality of life, for our recreation. They’ve made a lot of poor decisions about water in the legislature. And it’s really costly.
Probably a lot of people are aware of the problems of the Great Salt Lake right now. It’s lower than it’s ever been before, since we have been measuring it all the way back to 1871. And it’s a huge problem. I mean, there’s a billion and a half dollars’ worth of industry that depends directly on Great Salt Lake. It’s also just part of our identity here in northern Utah. You know, maybe the biggest issue that faces us here in Cache Valley are human health concerns. So as the lake goes down, it exposes lots of shoreline and lakebed. There’s 1,600 square miles of lakebed that’s exposed now. It’s a huge area. And that’s creating lots of gusts.
Anytime the wind kicks up, we are getting huge dust storms. And the worst thing is that dust has lots of nasty stuff in it. It’s got lead, arsenic, and zinc. It’s really dangerous for people’s health. And so this is a major human health catastrophe that we are staring down the barrel right now. Republican lawmaker Joel Ferry, who is now the director of the Department of Natural Resources, he called it an “environmental nuclear bomb”— the Great Salt Lake. And, you know, that may be a little bit more hyperbole than I am comfortable with, but it’s not far off.
I mean, if we don’t get the Salt Lake back — and I am calling the Salt Lake and not the Great Salt Lake now — if we don’t get the Salt Lake back, it’s incredibly detrimental to our health, to our economy, to people wanting to move here, to businesses wanting to move here. We just can’t have a high quality of life in northern Utah without the Great Salt Lake. And I think a lot of people didn’t appreciate that. I didn’t even appreciate that 10 or so years ago when I moved here. We have to get it back. But the problem now is it’s basically in the emergency room. And everything we do is going to be extreme measures, incredibly expensive.
It didn’t have to get to this point. The science has been telling us for a decade that we need to get more water down there. And the legislature ignored it year after year after year after year, until all the sudden, here we are. So having a water scientist in the legislature is going to make sure that we are making better decisions, and that we don’t let things like Great Salt Lake get into the emergency room situation that they’re in now. Lots of other water problems — and I’ll just cover them real quickly because I know we have a lot of other topics to cover — but the Lake Powell pipeline.
The legislature has been looking to build a pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George, just to fuel more unsustainable development there. And there’s just no water in Lake Powell. And there isn’t going to be for the foreseeable future. That’s 2 billion dollars that we would have completely wasted. It’s just the wrong conversations, the wrong decisions to be having. They’re looking to do the same thing here in Temple Fork watershed, part of the Logan River watershed. Put a dam, then build a pipeline that’s going to go out and take our water from Cache Valley out to the Wasatch Front. Again, just for more development. We need to be making much better decisions on water.
Climate and clean energy is another really important issue for me. I am a climate scientist. Utah is far, far behind in where we need to be on climate, and also on clean energy. We have a tremendous amount of clean energy potential in this state, and we are just not using it. And a big part of the reason is because the fossil fuel lobby has the ear of a lot of legislators. We don’t have time for that. I got a twelve-year-old daughter. And I am working every day to make sure that she, and all these students that we are teaching here at USU, have the possibility of a good, high-quality future. And we’re not on that track right now. And I know that’s a hard thing to say. The positive thing is, I think the global economy has decided that we are going to get this done. And we are going to transition to clean energy. And there’s big, powerful forces at play at a global scale.
The question is: Are we going to get it done with minimal amount of damage? Which requires a really rapid transition. Or, how long are we going to keep bickering about some of the— whether climate change is real and things like that, and just delaying progress. And potentially get up to a point where some really catastrophic and detrimental things — irreversible changes — happen. So, the global economy is going that direction.
The question before Utah is: Do we want to lead? Do we want to be the ones who are re-inventing the world as it should be, as it needs to be? Do we want to be the ones who are developing all the technologies of tomorrow and selling that to the world? Or do we want to sit around and keep bickering about whether climate change is real or not? Which it is. That hasn’t actually been in debate since the 1990s in the scientific community. Do we want to sit around and have nonsense conversations like that? Drag our feet and let somebody else take the lead, whether its China, or whoever else, and then have to buy whatever they’ve invented. I want Utah to be leading on this issue. We have the right brains, we’ve got a tremendous amount of technology potential here, and we should be leading.
And housing is maybe the third issue that I should mention that really sets me apart. We have a housing crisis here in Utah. Housing prices have gone out of control, rent is spiraling out of control — a lot of students are getting hurt by that right now. And the legislature did almost nothing to help. And that’s another hard truth to have to tell to a bunch of people who are trying to just make their way through school, and they are getting hit really hard by really high rent prices. But the legislature only gave the governor 20% of what he asked for to fix the housing crisis. That’s not enough. That’s not okay.
The person I am running against has received a lot of money from developers’ PACs — Political Action Committee. That doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, it doesn’t mean he is going to be necessarily working against students, but I am not taking any PAC money from developers. And I feel like we need to be having the right conversations and moving in the right direction for smart development. Make sure that we have a lot of deeply affordable housing here in Cache Valley, and in Utah in general. To make sure that we are curbing some of the bigger scale trends that are driving the housing crisis. To make sure that we are using most of the existing inventory. We’ve got laws that basically make sure that we can’t fill every house. You’ve got a five-bedroom house, you can’t have more than three people who are unrelated living in it. That’s not a great use of existing inventory, so I want to make that we are making better decisions down there. And I’ll be working on behalf of our students. And even our faculty are having a tough time finding housing. Doesn’t have to be this way. It’s decisions that we have made, and there are different decisions that we could make that are going to make things a lot better and easier for people.
Q: If you aren’t re-elected, how will you still be involved and serve the community?
A: Running for this office has been the most challenging and inspiring thing I have ever done in my life. And that’s a long list. I have always taken a lot of different leadership positions. I was faculty senate president here at USU. I am department head of an amazing department, Watershed Sciences. This has been in a whole different level.
I have gotten to get out and knock over 3,000 doors myself, and just talk to thousands of people across our community, and it has really improved my understanding all the issues people are facing and the concerns that they have, and the shared values that we all have. If you watch the news, it seems like we are all crazy polarized on one end of the spectrum or the other. You start getting out and talking to people, talking to your neighbors, talking to random people across this community, and what I have come to realize is that there are a lot of shared concerns and a lot of shared values. And I’m absolutely going to keep building on that.
I’m vice chair of Logan City’s renewable energy board as well. So, I have been doing some work along those lines, but this has pulled me into a whole host of other really important challenges that our community is facing that I feel like now I’ve got the understanding and a lot more than name recognition to keep things moving forward on that. I’ll just give you one example: the number of homeless people in Cache County is increasing really rapidly right now. And that’s something that’s going to change in the near future. We are going to continue to have an increasing number of homeless until we get our housing situation sorted out. So, we can ignore it — and that’s mostly been our plan up to this point — or we can start planning for it.
And we can start making sure that people have a safe and warm place to shelter. And Nicole Burnard is a citizen who decided that she was going to take this on, and she just started Logan’s first warming center that’s going to be opening up this December. And I am going to be on the advisory board for that center, and I am really honored that she reached out to me. She felt like I am somebody who’s going to help move that in a good direction and make sure that we are planning appropriately for it, and just taking care of people. And I want to take care of people on that kind of acute scale where somebody literally just doesn’t have a warm place to stay at night. And then I also want to be working on the bigger problems of why do we have people who don’t have warm places to stay at night? Let’s fix those broader issues in our economy, in our society, in our culture that have created these problems.
Q: What do you think is the most important responsibility of this position? How will you do your best to manage that?
A: So, I think it’s really hard to say that there’s one singular important, but I’ll try to narrow it down as best I can. I think one is that you are in contact with the people you are representing. And that’s why I started this campaign back in May, knocking doors. I still vividly remember the first door I went and knocked, and I had no idea what an amazing adventure that would be. Just meeting all these people around our community. But I think that’s absolutely essential that you’re in connection with the people you are supposed to be representing, and that’s a two-way conversation. You’re hearing what they are saying and that as a representative of all these people, I am going to be trying to explain some of the complexities of these issues. So that’s one really important one: be in contact with the people I’ll be representing.
Second is to have the hard conversations at the state capitol. We have legislators who view this job in a way that makes it pretty easy. You take bills that are developed by lobbyists, and you present them in committee and on the floor. And that’s the job in a nutshell. Lobbyists give you lots of money in between for running your campaign. And you get re-elected because we have a lot safe seats, because they gerrymandered a lot of the state’s voting districts. That’s not the way that I roll. I am a person who is in it to have the hard conversations about these critical issues we are facing. And it can’t just be my way or the highway kind of conversations, but it has to be getting at the heart of these matters. It has to be understanding all the complexities surrounding any one of these issues that come before the legislature. And talking with the 74 other people who will be representing different parts of the state in the House of Representatives, and winning hearts and minds there, helping them understand the decisions we’re making are going to impact people directly. And working on making better decisions.
A lot of water issues, it comes down to protecting the environment and making smart fiscal decisions. I could pitch the entire Salt Lake issue as: this was fiscally irresponsible to let it get this bad. Lake Powell pipeline? Fiscally irresponsible. We need to be having better conversations. But there are lots of other cultural issues I think we need to be having more broad conversations.
Right at the end of the last session, the legislature jammed through a bill that banned transgender kids from high school sports. This is a community that has some of the highest suicide rates of any demographic. These are kids who are trying to figure out who they are, and are having a hard time exploring that and figuring that out. And maybe they do know who they are, and they are having a hard time explaining that to society, because society doesn’t understand it yet with all the other challenges that are facing our state. Our legislators made a decision to spend a considerable amount of time debating a bill about whether or not to ban these transgender kids from high school sports. That’s appalling.
First of all, I don’t think the legislature has any reason to be delving into high school sports. But more importantly, they just have so many other critical issues to be working on. I want to be in the room where it happens so I can be in the middle of those conversations saying “Hey folks, lets re-focus on the bigger problems that we are facing right now, and let’s not jam through a bill that they have since come back and recognized was completely inappropriate.” It’s already brought a bunch of lawsuits against the legislature. Even the president of the state senate has acknowledged that it is a problematic bill. Well, maybe we shouldn’t be jamming them through. The governor, a Republican governor, vetoed it. But guess what? The echo chamber that’s in our state capitol decided to override the veto and they doubled down on a terrible bill that isolates transgender kids all throughout the state. It’s not okay. I want to be in the middle of those conversations winning hearts and minds of some of these other legislators to make sure things like that don’t happen.
Q: What do you hope to change or accomplish if elected?
A: I really want to change the conversations we are having as a state. I want to make sure that we are actually looking out for the most vulnerable people in our population. I want to make sure that we’re having the conversations that are going to ensure that our economy is working for everybody, not just special interests. And that is very much the way it is set up right now. Our economy is very much geared towards special interests. And that’s why so many people are hurting. So, I really want to be having the conversations about how we can take care of everybody, bring some compassion to the state legislature. Bring some sense of mindfulness, and that’s almost a bizarre statement, especially coming from a scientist. And I’ll be bringing lots of data too.
I’ll be bringing lots of data-driven decisions. But knowing all the data, knowing all the science and seeing how they operate down there, some sense of mindfulness, some sense of reflection, some sense of compassion that’s missing even more than science down there. They push through 500 bills every year in 45 days. It’s a big frenzy of passing bills. And I get that it’s all compacted into this short timeline — and maybe we should re-think that. But I want to be down there redirecting these conversations and making sure that people down in the capitol are keeping people who are experiencing all different kinds of challenges — economic, financial challenges, social challenges, mental health challenges, educational challenges — keeping all those people in mind, and taking the whole state to a better place.
I want to move us past the partisan rhetoric and party politics. I think the parties — and I am talking about of them, both of the big parties to a large extent — have really segregated our conversations that we are having. And they are pushing this ‘It’s my party or nothing’ mentality, and we cannot move forward as a country that way. So, I want to get past the partisan politics to real problem solving for real people. And that has been made harder this last year because the legislature decided to gerrymander the entire state. And both parties played some role.
The Republican certainly dominated because 78% of legislators were Republican. But they made a lot of safe seats for politicians, and that undermines our democracy in a fundamental way. If we create safe seats for politicians, then those politicians are not in contact with the people they are representing. It allows special interests to dictate things a lot more, and it means more extremist politicians get into office. And so I want to send us back in a direction of country over party, and repeal the gerrymandered maps of the state, so that we have fair and appropriate representation all across the state.
Q: What is your least favorite Aggie Ice Cream flavor?
Least favorite? That’s tough, I don’t have one. I refuse to answer that question on the premise that there’s no such thing. My most favorite is definitely Aggie ROTC.
-Jack.Johnson@usu.edu
Featured photo by Paige Johnson