Utah News Dispatch
A third-party senator, a ‘teacher of the year’ and an ‘ordinary citizen.’ Meet Utah’s new lawmakers
Forward Party of Utah Sen. Emily Buss, Democrat Rep. John Arthur, and Republican Rep. Leah Hansen. (Photos courtesy of the Utah Senate and House)
After three lawmakers quit their legislative roles to take other state leadership appointments, local office, or to open up unprecedented third-party elections, three newcomers will be casting their first votes in a general legislative session starting Tuesday.
Forward Party of Utah Sen. Emily Buss of Eagle Mountain is kicking off her public office career in the Utah Senate this year. She was chosen in an open, nonpartisan selection vote in her district to replace former longtime West Valley City Sen. Daniel Thatcher, who switched parties and then stepped down last year, opening up a spot for a new third-party lawmaker.
Rep. John Arthur, a Holladay Democrat, is replacing former Rep. Gay Lynn Bennion after she switched her state capitol seat for Cottonwood Heights’ Mayor’s Office.
After former House Majority Leader Rep. Jefferson Moss was tapped to lead the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, District 51 Republicans elected Rep. Leah Hansen of Saratoga Springs last summer.
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All will serve until the end of the year, unless they are reelected in November.
Buss, Arthur and Hansen spoke to Utah News Dispatch about their legislative ambitions as they prepared for the 45-day general session.
A lawmaker with no caucus
When Emily Buss starts her first legislative session as state senator, she won’t have a caucus to convene with. She, like her predecessor, will be the only Forward party voice in the Capitol, and she’s already feeling the pressure, she said.
“I kind of feel like I’m a political experiment for everybody involved,” Buss said.
The Forward Party of Utah came together when the state’s two centrist groups merged last year. It is an affiliate of the national Forward Party.
While many at the Capitol are helping her to get up to speed, Buss expects to be out of the loop on some issues.
“I hope that I can be an example of what politics can look like, and we’re just trying to solve the bipartisan issues,” she said, “and what you can achieve when your hands aren’t tied by party leadership.”
Buss, the 35-year-old founder of the Birthday Box Foundation, is now one of the youngest lawmakers this session. She hopes “to bring the resourceful millennial working-class mindset,” she said.
This year she’s working on a bill that would create a database for bill summaries described in plain language and with details on the financial impact they may have on county, city and personal taxes.
She’s also trying to find solutions for areas experiencing rapid growth, like the one where she lives. A goal for Buss, for example, is to find a way to create a grant for high-growth school districts.
“The area I’m from is exploding at the seams, and rather than putting all of that property tax burden onto the taxpayers, (the idea is) creating a fund that high-growth districts can qualify for to help secure land and capital improvements, like starting to build schools before they’re already bursting at the seams,” she said.
Buss’ district also encompasses other areas, like much of Tooele, and parts of West Valley City, Magna, Kearns and other municipalities west of Interstate 15. She plans on meeting with all of the mayors, city council members and city managers in the district to learn about their top concerns, she said. However, she has already defined a big priority for the area.
“I’m going to be a huge advocate on transportation and just infrastructure and connectivity in general for the west side and all of the communities that are growing,” Buss said.
While she may be considered “a wild card in the political sphere,” she said, don’t expect major drama from her time in the Legislature.
“No one knows what to expect from me, and I hope they’ll be pleasantly surprised that I’m just a nice, easy-to-get-along-with person who doesn’t care about the drama,” Buss said. “I’m just here to help the most people while I can make the biggest impact while I’m here. I don’t have ambitions of being a politician for my whole life.”
A Utah ‘teacher of the year’
The week before the start of the session, John Arthur was still “cranking out sub plans,” he said on Wednesday. Finding a long-term substitute for the full 45 days the Legislature is in session was a big concern for him as a teacher at a Title I school elementary school in Salt Lake City.
However, his job was also what inspired his political career, he said. Seeing how public education governance impacted his work, especially after receiving the 2021 Utah Teacher of the Year recognition, made him want to push for different standards and considerations as policy is being written.
While Arthur’s young years were spent on different army bases following his father, a U.S. Army airborne ranger, he grew up in Cottonwood Heights, where his family settled.
“Now, all these years later, I moved my wife and two little girls to nearby, in Holladay, but basically the same area and same community,” he said. “And now I am the representative in the statehouse for the same middle school and high school and friends and neighbors I grew up with.”
Arthur has filed his first bill, which aims to “deliver on the promises that we’ve made to educators,” he said, by ensuring teachers keep the raises they received when the Utah Fits All Scholarship passed, regardless of the program’s fate after a district court ruled it to be unconstitutional.
“If that program fails, then that raise for educators will also go away, and every teacher in the state of Utah will lose that money,” Arthur said. “And so my bill is an attempt to make sure that that is not a threat that we have to worry about.”
Another issue he’s hoping to pursue is the “amount of polarization and conflict” experienced in the Utah State Board of Education, an issue that has been ramping up since a 2016 law made the institution a partisan office.
“State school board races forever were nonpartisan, until that law passed,” he said. “And now we’re in a situation where our state school board is often in the news for not great things, because we are electing partisan school board members where we should really be focusing on (their) expertise and excellence in education.”
While that’s a big part of his platform, Arthur is also planning to push on natural resources and climate policy, he said.
Still, he acknowledges that entering the Legislature as a Democratic freshman may be rocky.
“I am not naive. I know that I am the newest kid in the minority caucus,” he said. “But I also believe my whole life that if you come to people with dignity and care, and you humanize them, and you let them know that you’re not coming with ulterior motives, you are coming to do good work that most people will meet you in that work.”
‘An ordinary citizen’
Leah Hansen has gradually learned all the ins and outs of citizen participation in the legislative process since she started attending committee and floor meetings 10 years ago.
“I learned all these things through trial and error, and it’s just become something that I don’t want to say I enjoy doing, but something that I feel I’ve needed to do,” Hansen said, “and I see so few of the ordinary citizens up there.”
Hansen said she’s first and foremost a wife and a mother. With her children grown she has been volunteering to manage a Saratoga Springs community social media account, and now, she’s preparing for a more active role, representing them in the Legislature.
However, the new Republican lawmaker isn’t aiming to file tons of legislative proposals.
As state leaders complain that lawmakers continue breaking the record number of bills introduced during the general session, Hansen’s approach is to start light this year.
“I don’t have any bills at this time because I believe that restraint begins with me. If I’m wanting to limit government, I’d better start by limiting myself,” she said. “But more so because there were so many bills that there were just so many to stay on top of, that I didn’t want to put any more burden on us than we need to be having at the moment.”
She’s looking at some issues, she said. But she hasn’t agreed to running any bills yet.
“I want to make sure that they are actually necessary and proper for the government to be doing,” she said.
Hansen was born in Hawaii to students from Tonga and New Zealand attending Brigham Young University-Hawaii. She lived in Tonga until she turned 12 years old, when her family moved to Utah and hasn’t left since.
Now, as a legislator, she says she wants to keep a connection to her Saratoga Springs community and have individual, “ordinary citizens,” like her, join lawmakers at the Capitol to see for themselves how laws take shape.
But also, she’s aiming to advocate for freedom and the proper role of government, she said.
Hansen hopes for better things for the country and the state, and she believes a lot of that can happen when leaders evaluate which direction the state is taking.
“Are we heading toward freedom, or is it something else that’s unrecognizable?” she said. “There are so many laws. I personally think that there are a lot of unnecessary laws that don’t need to be there.”
When asked about her thoughts on the role of government, she said, it should “stay in its lane, allow the people to live their lives.”
“I think government needs to mind their own business and just do the things that they’re supposed to do, which is to protect and secure the rights of the people, period,” she said.
