Cox calls lawmakers into special session Monday to address redistricting, other issues

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers will meet in a special legislative session on Monday to consider new congressional maps and address several other issues, Gov. Spencer Cox proclaimed Friday.

Lawmakers had long been eyeing a special session in September to clean up several bills from the general legislative session that wrapped up in March and enact several new policies. That changed in August when a Utah judge invalidated the state’s current congressional maps, necessitating a rushed timeline to replace those maps with new ones that conform to a 2018 ballot initiative on redistricting.

The Legislative Redistricting Committee will meet for a final time Monday morning to recommend a map to be adopted by the full Legislature in a special session that will kick off at 9 a.m. The committee met twice last month and has proposed six different maps for online public comment, which runs through Sunday.

Those maps have garnered more than 5,300 comments online as of midday Friday, and members of the public have submitted dozens of their own proposals for consideration.

Monday is also the deadline for plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Utah’s congressional maps to submit proposals of their own to the judge. If the plaintiffs raise concerns with the new map proposed by lawmakers, the court will hold a hearing later in October to give the judge time to select a final map by Nov. 10.

Lawmakers will also consider legislation to codify only one statistical measure to be used to determine whether the new maps meet requirements for “partisan symmetry.” The proposal is controversial, and critics say it’s a narrow measure that could allow the districts to be drawn to favor Republicans.

Better Boundaries, the group behind Proposition 4 in 2018, launched an ad blitz Friday in legislative districts where the proposition passed asking lawmakers to oppose that bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Highland. The group said codifying the single test would undermine the initiative’s intent and said lawmakers are trying to trick voters.

“Utahns passed Proposition 4 in 2018 to ensure districts are drawn with transparency, accountability and respect for communities rather than partisan interests,” said Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries. “The Legislature has a duty to follow the law and respect the will of the people. Brammer’s bill would weaken Prop 4 and threaten the fair process voters put in place. We urge every Utahn to call their legislators and tell them to vote ‘no.'”

The group planned to take out digital ads, billboards and send mailers to voters highlighting what it sees as a way to allow gerrymandered maps going forward.

The judge’s ruling noted that lawmakers still have the responsibility to decide which statistical methods should be used to check the fairness of proposed maps, and Brammer said his bill aims to create “certainty” about what the standards are going forward.

“I don’t think the goal of Prop 4 was to push every single map in all circumstances to a court,” he told the redistricting committee last week. “We want to create certainty so that … moving forward our courts are not in the middle of every controversy related to redistricting maps.”

Redistricting isn’t the only issue on the agenda for lawmakers next week. Cox vetoed several bills earlier this year and said he decided against vetoing several others that would be cleaned up in a special session.

Lawmakers are only allowed to discuss issues in a special session that are included in the governor’s proclamation, which lists 13 agenda items.

Those include considered changes to election records law, county councils, emissions testing, property management licensing, local sales taxes and to recodify some sections of code and make technical code changes.

Lawmakers will also weigh new proposals to let the governor appoint the chief justiceof the Utah Supreme Court, to make it easier to raise the berm of the Great Salt Lake and to accept federal rural health program funds passed through Congress’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”