With no money to spend and no elections to win, Utah lawmakers went to work tightening their leash on the state. 

• Cover art by Derek Carlisle

CAPITOL HILL—Some years, the Utah Legislature is flush with cash, generously dispersing spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down their constituents' throats.

And some years, the gravitational pull of a marquee election jolts the proceedings with media-luring bravado, distracting the showhorses while the workhorses keep their heads down and bring the cargo home.

But 2025 was neither of those years. Between January and March, a cash-poor and insufficiently stimulated Republican supermajority rolled up its sleeves and got into the weeds, tinkering with the machinery of government and irritating—seemingly—everyone in the process.

"I think the session was on track to be a lot worse for us than it ended up being," Salt Lake City Mayor Mendenhall said. "Our team did an extraordinary job standing up for the city and trying to negotiate in good faith for our priorities."

Lawmakers banned unions from schools, fire departments and libraries. They banned transgender students from college dorms and banned Pride flags from City Hall. They banned bike lanes in Salt Lake—figuratively, for the most part, but also quite literally.

They attacked the judiciary, rousing the legal community and provoking a seemingly unprecedented display of abject disapproval from Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Matthew Durrant.

They irritated The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, testing new road fees that would staunch the budgetary bleeding from runaway maintenance costs, but which would—unlike property taxes—apply to church-owned real estate.

• Wiki Commons
• Utah’s annual 45-day legislative session ended on March 7.

And they irritated each other, birthing a one-man Utah Forward Party caucus after West Valley's Dan Thatcher broke up with his (formerly) fellow Senate Republicans. And they launched an armada of conference committees in the session's final days, ad hoc panels of representatives and senators formed when the two chambers deadlock on preferred alterations to a bill.

"It's a new House, it's a new senate—lots of energy all the way around on both sides," said House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper. "Conflict—that's the way the legislative branch is set up."

Dorms and Norms
The early days of the 2025 session were dominated by two bans: one prohibiting the housing of transgender college students in single-gender dormitories that correspond with their gender identities; and another prohibiting public entities from formally engaging in collective bargaining.

Both passed and were signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox prior to the end of session, though a coalition of labor unions announced the launch of a referendum campaign to overturn the collective bargaining ban, HB267.

"I think that referendum can happen," said House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City. "It will be really interesting to see what happens in 2026 when we have an election, because I'm hoping people are going to say 'enough is enough'."

Hanging over the entire session was a threat to end mail-in voting. Lawmakers insist that Utah's elections need to be more secure, despite no election result having ever been legitimately questioned and the pesky, nagging detail that mail-in voting is extremely popular.

"There are some people, who know better, who have completely lied about our election system for their own gain," Cox said. "I do not condone that and yet, it has happened. Lots of people wrongly believe that we have mass fraud in our elections and it's just not true. But we need to restore trust to them as well."

House and Senate Democrats were opposed to all iterations of the mail-in voting bill, HB300, with Romero tying it to the goals of Project 2025, a blueprint by top officials in the Trump administration to restrict and dismantle democratic institutions.

"That's voter suppression to us," Romero said. "It's like Utah is the testing ground for all these horrible pieces of legislation."

By the end of session, the ban on transgender student housing was joined by a ban on the display of Pride flags and other pro-LGBTQ banners in and on government-owned buildings. While the obvious target was school classrooms, the bill also took aim at cities that might care to raise a Pride flag at their government headquarters, as Salt Lake City does each year on Washington Square, where the Utah Pride Festival is traditionally held.

• Courtesy photos

"That was so clearly targeted at Salt Lake City, as were a great many of those bills," Mendenhall said. "This will not impact the Pride Festival or any other festival that gets permitted allowance to use our public spaces. Private flag poles can hang the flag."

Salt Lake City Democratic Rep. Sahara Hayes, the only openly-LGBTQ member of the Legislature, said the flag ban "sucks"—she also "booed" when asked about it—and that, despite the majority's talk of promoting neutrality and fairness, it will harm people who have been on the receiving end of years of attacks from lawmakers.

"It's still going to leave its mark on people who feel like they're not safe to be seen," Hayes said. "And that's not negligible. That's going to impact a lot of people in this state and we've got to live with that."

But Cox defended the bill, saying the same people who oppose it would likely disapprove of a teacher hanging a "Make America Great Again" flag in school.

"This is the issue," Cox said. "Why are we having these battles in the classroom?"

SNAP, Crackle and Pop
South Jordan Republican Sen. Lincoln Fillmore took issue with the idea that lawmakers are control freaks, countering that when the state overrides a county or city, they are restoring power back to individual constituents and consumers. Along those lines, he was one of several lawmakers who sponsored legislation aimed at loosening the zoning restrictions that cities place on housing.

While most of those bills failed, one of Fillmore's, SB181, passed the Legislature and prohibits cities from requiring that designated affordable housing include a garage. In many municipalities—West Valley, for example—new homes are required to have a 2- or even 3-car garage, arbitrarily inflating the baseline cost to build, rent and purchase housing units.

• Benjamin Wood

"There is demand for housing at the first rung of the economic ladder and the government is constraining supply there," Fillmore said. "I think we need to keep moving forward the idea that we ought to lessen government interference in that market, so that demand can reach supply."

Lawmakers came close to easing the proximity restrictions that prevent the sale of alcohol near parks and other community destinations. But that provision was stripped from a larger package of tweaks to alcohol-related code, with the final bill allowing only the planned redevelopment at the state prison site to have the privilege of convenient adult beverage sales.

And participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, commonly known as "food stamps" may not be able to purchase so-called junk food in the future under HB403, which directs the Department of Workforce Services to pursue a waiver from federal SNAP guidelines. While the Senate was narrowly divided in a 15-13 vote on the bill, it comfortably passed the House 54-14 along party lines.

"I was once on food stamps. I'm a product of the system," Romero said. "To tell a family that you can't buy a piece of candy or you can't have a soda is ludicrous."

Lawmakers took a particular turn on the issue of transportation, subjecting Salt Lake City to new levels of scrutiny and oversight by the Utah Department of Transportation and blurring what were once clear lines between state-owned roads like State Street/Highway 89 and city-owned streets like Main Street or 600 East.

• Benjamin Wood

Under SB195, Salt Lake City is temporarily blocked from initiating any street improvement projects on collector and arterial roads until preparing a new citywide "mobility plan" and receiving approval from UDOT.

But after pushback from residents and closed-door negotiations with city representatives—plus a few deceptive twists and turns by the House and Senate floor sponsors—the bill was amended to allow "expedited review" of projects scheduled for this year, like plans to add protected cycling facilities to 300 West and 400 South.

Institutional stakeholders like the Utah Transit Authority and Wasatch Front Regional Council largely stayed out of the fight on SB195, at least publicly. UTA spokesman Gavin Gustafson said the transit agency is prepared to work with the city and state to prepare transportation plans that serve all roadway users.

"UTA will continue to support and work closely with our partners at SLC, SL County, UDOT and the state to advance our collective efforts to improve public transit and mobility within our service area," Gustafson said.

Dollars and Sense
By midway through the legislative session, lawmakers had largely appropriated all of the year's available budget surplus.

A 4% boost to per-student funding in public education and cost of living adjustments for state employees were built into base budgets, leaving the equivalent of loose change for the prioritization of other requests as the session drew to a close.

But legislative leaders made a point to tuck a little money aside for tax cuts, trimming the income tax rate to 4.5%, expanding the child tax credit and eliminating the tax on social security for individuals earning less than $90,000 per year.

"In a tight budget year, we were able to come together, still do tax cuts and tax relief for the citizens of the state," Shultz said.

The Legislature also returned a small amount of excess funding to its rainy day accounts, bolstering reserves that, in the eyes of some critics, are bursting at the seams. Salt Lake City Democratic Rep. Jennifer Dailey-Provost questioned the wisdom of stockpiling cash when so many substantive requests for funding—and particularly in the health care and social services arena—were turned away. But she also noted that the state could soon find itself needing to dip into those reserves to cover shortfalls stemming from the Trump administration's budget moves in D.C.

"We have to be clear-eyed about the fact that funding at the federal level right now is uncertain," Daily-Provost said. "Our state is going to have to pick up the slack when some of that harm comes down the pike."

While House Democrats were critical of some of the trends they see in the majority's priorities, they were also complimentary toward the respect and deference afforded them by House leadership.

Romero said that, unlike past years, Democratic-sponsored legislation is being allowed out of the rules committee—a procedural body that can function like a lockbox or a switchboard, depending on the chairperson—and given the chance of a fair hearing.

"The speaker made a commitment to us and he's kept that commitment with the majority of our bills," Romero said.

She said the Democratic caucus is a symbol that the state is not monolithic. And while Romero and her fellow Democrats may be in the minority today, "one day soon" they will be in the majority.

"People need to pay attention to what's going on up here," Romero said. "And if they don't like what's happening, they need to execute their right to vote."