SPECIAL SESSION
The legislature will likely call ourselves into a special session as early as next week. Because of the restrictions in place, there will not be committee hearings for the bills we will be discussing, but a time and process will be set up for public comment–I will let you know what and when that will be when I find out. The legislature will be meeting remotely, and the session will be streamed to the public. It will likely take place over several hours each day for several days. Our tech people are amazing and have been working hard to prepare for this.
Some of the issues we need to address right away are to accept the federal funds that have been appropriated to Utah, take away some of the restrictions on our rainy day funds, and reduce what spending we can in our budget.
There are also policy questions we will be looking at, including unemployment benefit changes, assistance to businesses left out of the CARES Act, clarifying emergency powers for ongoing versus singular events, and possibly some other things.
There have been rumors that we might change the primary election date to August, but it will remain on June 30th. However, there will be changes to make the election more social distancing friendly.
Two VERY important websites
At https://coronavirus.utah.gov/, you can find data, resources, and videos that are constantly being updated. Look under the resource tab for information for businesses, non-profits, families, child care, recreation, etc.
At https://www.testutah.com/, you can take an assessment that will help us get better data so that we can start easing the restrictions on businesses and get us back to normal more quickly. We are encouraging everyone to take this self assessment.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do or you. I hope you and your loved ones are staying healthy and happy!