Elections are coming up quickly, and with them is a round-two face-off between Kris Campbell and incumbent Kera Birkeland for District 4 Utah House of Representatives. Thanks to an obvious case of gerrymandering, the boundary for District 4 cuts right through Summit County, splitting Snyderville in half, and covers all of Kimball Junction and the east side of the county — Kamas, Oakley, Coalville — before running north to include Morgan and Rich counties all the way to the border of Idaho.For voters in these areas, electing a representative in the Legislature is actually an essential part of democracy, Campbell said. As the Democrat candidate, Campbell began participating in politics more actively after seeing how the Legislature made decisions that directly affected his quality of life as a Wasatch Back resident. Specifically, the 2019 tax referendum effort.“The Legislature had called a special session right before the Christmas holidays and ran through some pretty large tax changes without really considering public input and interest,” he said.The proposed tax reform was to drop income tax but increase sales tax, which would impact costs of things like groceries and gasoline. Though an overall tax cut, it would sidestep a requirement of the state’s constitution that mandates that income taxes support education, and instead place revenue in an unrestricted General Fund.“Utahns from from across the state — from multiple parties and different demographics, young, old, urban, rural, rich, poor, all across the spectrum — came together to for this pretty Herculean effort of gathering enough signatures in 45 days from enough counties to be able to stop the bills from being enacted,” Campbell said. “That effort gave me a lot of hope for what democracy could look like to be working with neighbors like that.”So, as a resident of Silver Creek Estates, Campbell decided to run for District 4 representative against Birkeland in 2022. While the vote didn’t go his way in 2022, his resulting 42% of the vote was actually a huge victory for him — the highest percentage for a Democrat in that district in years.“I think that the odds will continue to go up,” he said, explaining that he’s spent more time getting to know the district’s constituents. “When I first showed up, I was just some guy who was running for office. In Rich County and Morgan County, they didn’t know who I was. I’ve been taking some time to develop and build trust and get people to know who I am, and to trust that regardless of whether people vote for me or not, it’s my job to represent everybody and to listen to everybody in my district and take their concerns into consideration.” Campbell said his ability to understand any “shenanigans” attempted by the Legislature is a direct result of his background in applied math and computer science. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wyoming, a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and a doctorate from the University of Utah.“One of the benefits of having a computer science background is that I’m very comfortable debugging computer code and reading it and understanding how things work,” he said. “I find that reading bills and legal code is a very similar process. It’s very easy for me to get in and understand bills and how they’re structured.”He gave the examples of Dakota Pacific and the Hideout Annexation as situations where “it felt like there was an agenda that the Legislature was pushing that wasn’t necessarily aligned with people’s interests.” As representative, he said it’s his role to give local communities the flexibility to make decisions, something he knows is key in a district as large and diverse as District 4. But these communities have plenty of similarities, too. “It’s been interesting to see — as I’ve learned more and more over the past three years about Morgan County and Rich County and the communities in those counties — how much similarities we have between them and the communities in the eastern side of Summit County,” Campbell said.Concerns around affordable housing, development pressures, short-term rentals and second homeowners are all popping up in those more rural counties, he said. There’s also water concerns, which is the case in many places across the state, and the impacts on agricultural communities and development projects.Because Summit County has seen these issues for longer, Campbell said as representative he would want to “build collaborations, help Morgan and Rich counties learn the lessons that we’ve been learning in Summit.”His goal is to focus primarily on the issues that voters are saying are their biggest concerns, quoting a survey study from the Utah Foundation that listed affordable housing, divisive politics, government overreach, affording everything else besides housing and partisan politics as the top five.“I hear from a lot of people that they’re tired of the fighting and the division and the toxic politics, and they’re not interested in playing that game,” he said. “People are tired of the government overreach from the Legislature … where they don’t like an answer that the judicial system gives them, and so they don’t respect that. They don’t like what the Constitution says, and so they work to change that.”It’s a practice that Campbell said his opponent Birkeland seems to uphold, voting in support of controversial proposals like Amendment D, which would overturn a recent state Supreme Court decision and give state Legislature and local legislative bodies the unrestricted right to amend or repeal initiatives approved by voters.“(Kera ran a bill) that says that the state of Utah wants to just choose when it decides to follow the supreme law of the land, which I think is disrespectful of our (U.S.) Constitution,” Campbell said. “I think a lot of people in the district respect the Constitution and expect our elected officials to respect both our state and federal Constitution, to respect our system of checks and balances.”Hopeful for a chance to prove himself to voters now and following the election, Campbell said he’s ready and willing to listen to the needs of the people.“I’m really here to work with people to find the solutions that work for as many of us as possible, that it takes all of our perspectives together to get to the best solution,” he said. “Send me an email, ask me questions, find out more. I just really appreciate people taking an open mind and looking and considering what’s going to serve their needs first.”Learn more about Campbell’s platform on his website, kris4utah.com.The post Kris Campbell is prepared to defend constituents from a ‘sneaky’ Utah Legislature appeared first on Park Record.