At SUU panel event, former Gov. Leavitt, other leaders discuss using lessons of past to plan for future

CEDAR CITY — Former Utah Gov. Michael O. Leavitt and other government officials talked about big gears and learning from the past during a public discussion event titled “What’s Past is Prologue” on Tuesday evening.

L-R: Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt, U.S. Rep. Celeste Maloy and state Sen. Evan Vickers participate in a panel discussion at Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah, March 26, 2024 | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News

The two-hour event included two back-to-back moderated panel discussions in the Sharwan Smith Building on the Southern Utah University campus. 

During his opening remarks, Leavitt mentioned that he had spent his childhood nearby.

“In case you don’t know where 700 West is, it’s about two blocks that way,” he said. “This is the place that I literally grew up.”

Leavitt then acknowledged his parents, Dixie and Anne Leavitt, who were seated in the front row.

“My father and mother met on this campus as college students,” he said. “And I was here once when they dedicated the business building, which is in fact, associated with his name.”

Leavitt recounted that when his father was elected to the state Legislature, he would take his young sons to the state Capitol building for a week each year.

As part of the deal, he said, “When we returned, having missed school for a week and shadowing our dad, we would have to write a report on what we observed and what we learned during that week.”

Former Utah Gov. Michael O. Leavitt holds up a copy of the first four volumes of his memoir, Cedar City, Utah, March 26, 2024 | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News

Now, some 60 years later, the 73-year-old Leavitt has authored a multi-volume autobiography, titled “Michael O. Leavitt: A personal history and public service memoir.” The first four installments are all available to read for free online, with a fifth volume due next year.

“This is, in essence, my report on what I have learned,” he said.

Among the insights Leavitt shared was a story about when his young daughter was watching with fascination a clock repairman work on a grandfather clock in the governor’s mansion.

“He said to Anne Marie, ‘Turn the little gear,’” Leavitt recalled. “She put her fingers down and said, ‘It’s stuck. It won’t move.’ He said, ‘Turn the big gear.’ She took her hands and twisted the big one. And she said, ‘Look! All the little ones spin!’”

That moment taught Leavitt an important lesson, he said.

“When you’re doing public policy and you’re planning for the future, don’t spend your time as a leader fussing with the little gears because many of them you can’t move,” he said. “You have to look for the big gears and turn the big gears.”

L-R: Sen. Don Ipson, former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt, Stephen Lisonbee, Mary Weaver Bennett, Rita Osborn and Wes Curtis, Cedar City, Utah, March 26, 2024 | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News

That gear analogy, along with using the lessons of the past to plan for the future, was touched on repeatedly during the ensuing panel discussions, both of which were moderated by Deseret News executive editor Doug Wilks.

The first panel consisted of U.S. Rep. Celeste Maloy, who recently took office representing Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, and state Sen. Evan Vickers. Among the main topics discussed were infrastructure, energy, wilderness and tourism.

“I am closing in quickly on the four-month mark as a member of Congress, so I’m still pretty new in that,” Maloy said. “But when I was a child, my dad worked in a tungsten mine. And China flooded the market with tungsten in the 1980s and killed the U.S. tungsten industry. It is a textbook example of unfair trade practices on the world stage, but it’s my childhood. So the mine closed down, and a lot of the dads in my community lost their jobs. And it really impacted my hometown.”

Moving on to today’s current situation, Maloy said the Biden administration is to blame for higher fuel prices.

“When it comes to energy policy, we were energy independent a few years ago, and that had a big impact on our economy,” she said. “And we got a new president, and the new president issued executive orders about how we extract energy from public lands. And that made us no longer energy dependent, and that made energy prices higher, and that made fuel prices higher.”

Maloy said that has created ripple effects on “smaller and smaller gears.”

“So we have inflation that’s making it harder for people to put food on their tables,” she said.

Vickers quoted Gov. Spencer Cox recently stating that when it comes to energy, Utah is a “D, all of the above” state.

“We have natural resources, and we’ve been blessed with utilizing natural resources, natural gas, coal to drive down energy prices,” Vickers said. “We have a vast amount of wind and solar, so renewables, we have. We’re moving into the hydrogen era with IPP (Intermountain Power Project) … I don’t know if you know this, but in Delta right now they’re heating 1,800 homes with natural gas and a mixture of  5% hydrogen. It’s just a start. But nuclear has to be on the horizon.”

Vickers also touted the idea of small modular nuclear power plants, which he said could provide on-site power for large data centers.

Stephen Lisonbee speaks during a panel discussion at Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah, March 26, 2024 | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News

“That’s the future,” he said. “That technology exists. There’s continuing to be new energy development and new exploration, new research in the nuclear world. But it’s going to take a big paradigm shift in the advocates being willing to accept that nuclear is a clean optional source of energy.”

Touching on a similar topic, Leavitt noted, “Things are shifting in society to where the solutions aren’t as relevant as they might have been 25 or 30 years ago, because the economy is not as powered by those things.”

“There are people who have Chicago salaries and live in rural Utah,” Leavitt said. “Why? Because they just really like it. And that’s beginning to develop the economy.”

The second panel discussion focused on infrastructure, housing, technology and education. The four featured panelists were state Sen. Don Ipson, Utah Center for Rural Health Executive director Rita Osborn, SUU assistant vice president Stephen Lisonbee, who is also Gov. Cox’s senior adviser for rural affairs, and Wes Curtis, retired director for Utah Center for Rural Life at SUU.

Osborn talked about the importance of connectivity and access when it comes to remote healthcare and telemedicine.

“Our hospitals and clinics rely on technology and broadband to sustain themselves to provide the service for our patients, but also our hospitals and EMS systems in Utah,” she said, noting that there are 21 independent rural hospitals throughout the state.  

“We’re one of only five states in the country that has not had a hospital closure,” she added. 

Curtis spoke of the importance of effective leadership.

Michael O. Leavitt, who was Utah’s governor from 1993-2003, speaks during a panel discussion at Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah, March 26, 2024 | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News

“As I look at how things have progressed over the last 25 years, and see that we are on a forward-moving path, I’m optimistic that we will continue to see good things happen in rural Utah and throughout the state,” Curtis said. “But again, I think the catalyst to all these things is leadership both at the state level, but primarily at the local level. Because in any success you can point to anywhere, you can point to the leader who made it happen.”

Lisonbee stressed the importance of building and maintaining various forms of infrastructure, including wider broadband internet access.

“I would say that the most important thing is infrastructure,” he said. “We’ve heard tonight, so much discussion around growth, whether it be housing, energy, but the infrastructure associated with that, it’s wide-ranging.”

For Ipson, one of the biggest challenges is water, a topic he says keeps him awake at night.

“We’ve got to figure out how (to do) these water projects that are big,” he said. “You talk about big gears, they are big gears, and they’re going to be hard. And we’re going to be hard-pressed to fund them. 

“How will we find the water? And where will we get it?” Ipson added. “That’s a challenge.”

During his closing remarks, Leavitt thanked the participants and attendees and summed up the discussion with a reminder.

“I’ll just remind all of us that the past is prologue and the future is bright,” Leavitt said. “What we can learn from the past is you turn the big gears, the little ones spin.”

Photo Gallery

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2024, all rights reserved.