Pub. 2 2019-2020 Issue 3

5 the other brother, so he moved his family to Fairview. We’ve been there ever since. It was fascinating growing up in a very small town. Depending on what’s going on, it’s either great or it’s awful because you know everyone. My dad refers to it as Mayberry, from the Andy Griffith show. Everything was just kind of perfect. Then something happened. The state and the nation decided to expand the freeway system and connect all of our states together. Highway 89 ran right through the heart of Fairview and Sanpete county all the way down. There was a lot of discus- sion about where the new freeway would go. The freeway ended up not following 89 after southern Utah county. Highway 6 and 89 continued down, but I-15 parted paths and went to Juab County, to Nephi and eventually Las Vegas. Have you seen Cars? Cars is the story of Fairview because time passed it by, just like the town in the movie. When I saw Cars with my children, they said, “Dad, why are you crying?” Every town has the same problems that big cities have. People are litigious and sewers back up, but you don’t have the human capital to solve those prob- lems. My wife calls it the STP: the same 10 people do everything, and getting other people involved is hard to do. Fairview is one of the few cities of its size that has ever even engaged in a planning effort. We have an increasing divide in our country, and we need to fix it. The red votes all come from rural places, and the blue votes come from big cities, although there are exceptions to that. To fix the divide, you need to get prox- imate. The people who work in the leg- islature can’t make good policies if they don’t have the knowledge to make informed decisions. Economic development and access to telecommuting are other tools that can fix the divide. Small towns can be a really great place to live, but there have to be good jobs available. Without jobs, people either get stuck in poverty or they leave. But because the towns are so small, you do need to have careful planning so you don’t put too much strain on the exist- ing infrastructure. We need really smart people to help us come up with the right solutions, and we need them to understand rural Utah as well as urban Utah. 3 We want to invest in our roads. We pour close to 4 million tons of asphalt per year in Utah. I am proud of our roads , and that comes from someone who spends a lot of time on them!