Eight Veterans, Two Parties, One Table: My Report From the Veterans Town Hall & Roundtable
Updated: Oct 24
On October 14, eight veterans running for office sat down at one table in Sandy— three Republicans and five Democrats, from county races all the way up to Congress— and spent two hours answering to the veterans we're asking to serve. It was the first time in Utah that veterans running for office have shared a stage like that across party lines. We didn't agree on everything. We weren't supposed to. We argued honestly, we listened, and we found more common ground than I expected to walk out with.
The full video is above. Fair warning: I'm reporting back on a two-hour panel, so this is going to be long. Consider this my Heather Cox Richardson moment— pour a coffee. But a conversation like this deserves to be written down, and not everyone has two hours to sit with the video. So here's what happened, who said what, and what I took home. The timestamps will take you straight to each moment.
The rules of the room (0:00)
The VFW Department of Utah presented the night at the Miller Free Enterprise Center on SLCC's Miller Campus. Our moderator was Chris Meador— twelve years in the Army, Iraq with the 82nd Airborne, medically retired, and now commander of VFW Post 1274. He set the ground rules before any of us said a word. "This is a nonpartisan event. Republican, Democrat, that's outside the door. We're all veterans, and we're here for veterans." Then one more that ought to hang over the door of every legislative chamber: "If you say you support veterans, be prepared to explain what specific action you would like to take."
Here's who sat at the table (6:30), in seating order:
Jonny Larsen— Democrat, U.S. House, Utah's 4th District. U.S. Marine Corps.
Shana Anderson— Democrat, Utah Senate District 19. U.S. Army and Utah Army National Guard.
Kent Davis— Republican, Salt Lake County District Attorney. U.S. Army.
Drew Howells— Democrat, Utah House District 39. U.S. Air Force, Utah Air National Guard, and Utah Army National Guard.
Riley Owen— Republican, U.S. House, Utah's 1st District. U.S. Navy Reserve, still serving.
Rosemary Lesser— Democrat, Utah House District 10. U.S. Air Force.
Shane Manwaring— Republican, Salt Lake County Sheriff. U.S. Army.
Dave Calder— Democrat, Utah House District 11. U.S. Air Force.
Riley told the room he isn't technically a veteran yet. He's been a Navy Reserve intelligence officer for three years and he's still serving. The table wasn't having it (10:50). He's family, and he'll be in the DD-214 club soon enough. Kent mentioned this is the first time he's ever run for anything— "and if anybody's considering it, I wouldn't recommend it." I have never related to a sentence more.
Disabled veterans and property taxes (13:30)
Chris opened with a fight from the 2026 session. SB 78 raised concerns that the disabled veteran property tax exemption could end up depending on county decisions, and "every veteran I spoke with was opposed," Chris said. Should it stay a consistent statewide benefit, or should counties decide?
Rosemary answered first (14:30). The exemption, she said, means "the state is saying much more than thank you for your service." She gave the counties their due, then turned it around. "I appreciate that counties may feel that they are sort of getting a raw deal on that. Well, the veteran also got a raw deal, and it's our responsibility to stand with the veteran." One statewide rule, not a hodgepodge that changes at the county line.
I asked to jump in, because this one is personal (15:00). I'm in the hundred percent disabled category, living on a fixed income from the VA, and that exemption is the difference between affording to live in my home and not. So I asked the question that gets skipped every time this comes up. If we're worried about what communities lose in property taxes, why aren't we talking about the tax breaks corporations get through the Governor's Office of Economic Development? We're giving Meta twenty-year property tax holidays on campuses dozens of acres wide. "But we're complaining about little bits and pieces for disabled veterans and seniors? Give me a break." If we want to take the burden off our neighbors, we need to stop giving away the house to the corporations. "That's where the real money's going away. That's my honest opinion."
Shana came right in behind me (17:00). "I'll jump in and second you, Drew." Utah's economy is outrunning most of the country, she said, "and yet our legislature keeps cutting taxes for those that have a lot, and then we're blaming our most vulnerable people and our veterans for taking from others." At her county convention, someone had come to her with tables and lists of how much tax money the veterans exemption supposedly costs. "I was pretty appalled that that was the issue." Someone down the table summed up the round: "I think we're speaking with one voice on this."
Chris pushed further (18:45). If a bill like SB 78 comes back in 2027, what protections would you insist on? I said go the other direction. Expand the veterans exemption and the senior circuit breaker, actually tell people these programs exist, and tie the relief to inflation. "As inflation grows and our property value increases, so does the tax burden." Chris closed it with his own math (20:00). He's a hundred percent disabled too— "Some days I like to call myself a Washington State refugee"— and he figures he saved about seven thousand dollars last year living in Utah. Nobody at that table argued for handing it to the counties.
Suicide, PTSD and treatment (20:55)
Chris asked what the legislature should do in 2027 that Utah isn't doing today. Shane went first, and he told the story I keep coming back to (22:30). Veterans Court, which the sheriff's office takes part in, lets veterans who end up in trouble with the law go through supervised treatment and keep those charges off their record. Years ago, as a patrol sergeant, Shane was talking with a struggling veteran. The veteran said something, and Shane's two officers turned, pointed at him, and mouthed: "That's you." His takeaway: "Nobody can speak to a veteran better than another veteran. Nobody can call another veteran out when they're being stupid like another veteran."
Rosemary named the gap under all of it. Utah doesn't actually know how many veterans it has. She wants veteran status on the census, and she said fewer than a quarter of Utah veterans have registered for VA benefits. If we don't know who served, we can't tell them what they've earned. She also wants the state to enforce the law the legislature just passed against claim sharks— the outfits that promise to speed up a veteran's claim and skim off the top. Riley said that should be banned at the federal level, too, and pointed out the VFW has pushed for it for years.
Jonny took it to the VA itself (26:30). Mental health providers got an email last year telling them to retire, leave or quit. "How does that help veterans when we tell them to leave?" I added what a mental health supervisor at the Salt Lake VA told me earlier this year. They'd lost six therapists in six months, and each one carries somewhere between three hundred and five hundred veterans. That's thousands of Utah veterans handed off in the middle of treatment. For someone in crisis, that interruption can be life or death.
That's when I talked publicly for the first time about the Utah Veterans Ombudsman and Accountability Act (28:30). We have the VA, Veterans Court, the sheriff, the DA, the state department and a dozen more agencies. It's Cerberus— all heads and no front door. When a veteran files a complaint against a VA provider, it gets treated like an HR matter, and the veteran often never learns what happened. A friend of mine spent five days after her mother died bouncing between the VA, the veterans cemetery at Camp Williams, and a hunt for her late father's DD-214. One independent office should own problems like hers, and report to the legislature every year on how Utah's veterans are actually doing. I've written a whole post on it, and you can read the full plan here: One Door, Every Answer: Introducing the Utah Veterans Ombudsman and Accountability Act.
Someone at the table cut in with the one number we do know (32:00). Twenty-two of us, every day.
Kent went straight to the data (32:15). Nobody's tracking whether Veterans Court graduates reoffend. Prove the program works, he said, and the legislature has every reason to fund more of it. Then he said something I wrote down. Veterans who separated honorably spent years living by a rigid set of rules and succeeding at it. "That is almost the ideal population for somebody that needs to be rehabilitated. They can do hard things."
Shana floated an idea she admitted was brand new and not fleshed out yet: squads of veterans doing homeless outreach together, like a team she'd watched work in Sacramento. Most veterans, she said, want a mission. They want to be useful.
Chris pulled us back to the question (38:00), and he told us why it matters to him. He has ten brothers who aren't here today after coming home from Iraq.
My answer was money, honestly. I have a folder on my computer full of legislation I've already written— yes, I'm that kind of nerd— and one of those bills expands the mission and the budget of the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs. I'd like to see something like the National Endowment for the Arts, but for veterans programs: state dollars for the nonprofits and veteran groups already reaching people the VA can't. Some veterans won't set foot in the VA, and some of them have good reasons. We were sitting in a building named for the Miller family. The Huntsmans built a cancer institute. Utah has the philanthropy to partner on this. Chris translated for the room: "By ‘fill the gap,’ he means cough up the money." Yep.
I'll own one thing here. I went long on my answers all night. I'm the one who brought the timer lights for the table, and Chris got plenty of use out of them on me.
Cutting future benefits to pay for today's (43:20)
Chris put a federal question to the table, about a package he likes to call TACAVA. Should Congress expand benefits for one group of veterans if it means reducing or restructuring what future veterans can get?
Jonny didn't hesitate (44:00). "First of all, omnibus bills suck." The package, he said, gets rid of tinnitus and sleep apnea to pay for everything else, buried in Section 108. "Why do we do this at the cost of our veterans who made that sacrifice, and more importantly, our fellow brothers and sisters who aren't here, who paid the ultimate price?" And: "If we have elected members who want to send us to war, who wouldn't go serve and do that themselves or send their own children... maybe they shouldn't be sending anyone to war."
Chris handed it to Riley (45:00), who started into his master's work at Oxford on how warfare is changing. "We're using unmanned technologies. The way we fight wars is dramatically different."
Jonny cut in before he could finish (46:00). "We just lost twenty members in the current conflict. We're not even sure if that's the right count. They're not being honest with us right now." He caught himself for a second, then kept going. "It hurts. It hurts. I've lost my fellow brothers coming home in horrible IEDs, and this is how we get treated when we're home." He brought up a Vietnam veteran's warning to "stop electing politicians who are sending your sons and daughters to go fight and die in this war," questioned the nuclear weapons claims and the "imminent threat" used to justify this one, and called it "profiteering over oil or some other garbage." His last words on it: "No more."
Riley let him finish. Then (47:15): "If I could circle back to the question and finish off where I was going." As wars change, he said, so do the needs of the people who fight them. "I don't think we should be approaching the services we offer veterans from a strictly budgetary perspective. We should be approaching it from what are the needs of our veterans." He didn't buy the premise of the bill. "I'm not sure the false dichotomy needs to be true, that we need to cut from one group in order to be able to pay for another group. That's the wrong approach in my opinion, and I'm a fiscal conservative myself."
This is the exchange I'd show anyone who thinks Republicans and Democrats can't hear each other on veterans. Jonny had just torn into the war. Riley didn't fight him on it, and he didn't pretend it hadn't happened. He brought it back to the veteran.
Jonny met him there (48:30). "You know, as a Blue Dog, I'm a fiscal conservative as well." His cut: the private contractors "that get paid to go kill people after work." As a Marine infantryman he made two hundred twenty-five dollars a month in danger pay. He could have made two hundred thousand a year going back as a contractor, and he chose not to.
Dave picked it up (49:30). "When you put someone in harm's way, there's a cost associated with that. So this idea that, well, we're just gonna have a fixed budget for veterans at the end is wrong." Then he followed Jonny. "We're in a war that we should not be in. I know we're at state legislature, but we need to circle back to that." We need to get out, he said.
I gave the room an old military acronym (50:30). BOHICA— bend over, here it comes again. That's what the VA feels like when benefits get treated as a zero-sum game. Tinnitus and sleep apnea aren't fringe conditions. Plenty of us spent years on flight lines. "If we're gonna go to war, we're gonna have to pay the bill when it's due." And when you grandfather some veterans in and leave the new ones out, you build a second tier of veterans, "which is exactly the way they break up unions." Hands off.
Veterans treatment courts (52:10)
Should Utah expand Veterans Court so eligible veterans can get in no matter which county they live in? The whole table: "Yes." Chris: "How's that for less than sixty seconds?"
Kent laid out the gap. The Third District here in Salt Lake County has one. The Fourth District to the south has one. That covers maybe half the state's population, and if you live anywhere else, it isn't an option. Measure it, prove it works, expand it, he said. Treatment courts that work are cheaper and more effective than the traditional system. Shane said the infrastructure is already there— the court, the attorneys, the judge. At most, a couple of full-time positions at the sheriff's office. Rosemary pointed out that the legislature just paid to add two Utah Supreme Court justices when the people who actually work in the courts said the bigger need was district judges.
Jonny tied it back to tax breaks for data centers, as high as eighty percent in some cases. Chris, who said he's done data center and crypto work himself, mentioned he and I had talked about attaching strings: you get the tax break, and part of it funds programs like Veterans Court. I'm going to keep pushing that one.
Housing (58:15)
This was the real debate of the night, and it was a good one.
Chris asked whether Utah should expand the veterans first-time homebuyer grant. Somebody said "Yes," and Chris said he liked the six-second answer.
Shana slowed it down (58:50). The VA home loan is how she bought a home right after getting out. "Five hundred thousand dollars should be enough. The problem is that housing costs too much, and our housing right now is getting bought out by investors and private equity and hedge funds." Her fix: "You just change the tax law. Right now we have tax laws that benefit home investors instead of people who live in homes and are raising families."
I agreed (1:00:20). Tie benefits to owner occupancy— "if you're gonna have that benefit, you have to actually occupy and live in that home." I wouldn't have my home without the VA loan, so I'm for expanding programs like it, tied to inflation and market values. Shana pushed back on me right there (1:00:50). "The market's inflated, so it's gonna come down. If it's tied with inflation... when it comes back down, do you then lower it as well?" Fair question.
Riley came in from the federal side (1:01:10). The new federal ROAD to Housing Act, he said, defines an institutional investor as someone holding three hundred fifty or more single-family homes. "That is a wildly high threshold in my view." He'd seen numbers putting institutional investors at three to eight percent of single-family homes. Shana cut in: "Thirty percent. Thirty percent in Salt Lake County." Riley allowed that it varies and hits hardest in dense areas. His plan: get the institutional investors out, reward cities that loosen zoning, and expand the low-income housing tax credit, because the real shortage is supply. Then he explained why he's wary of grants like the one Chris asked about (1:03:00). "There's maybe sixty of us in the room. Let's say I'm selling five apples, but I go around and I give everyone a hundred dollars. What's gonna happen to the price of apples? It's gonna go up immediately. Who benefits? Me, the guy selling the apples, not the people trying to buy them."
Shana didn't hesitate (1:03:55). "That's absolutely right. It's another reason why I'm not a hundred percent with increasing the benefit, because it just raises the cost for everyone." Riley finished the sentence with her: "Everyone." A Democrat and a Republican, agreeing on housing economics in real time.
Rosemary found a flaw in the program (1:04:10). Utah's first-time homebuyer help only applies to new construction, which does nothing for a built-out city like Ogden. "There are hundreds of houses on the market in Ogden that are under three hundred thousand dollars. So come on up to Ogden." Jonny pointed south (1:05:40), where Utah County is building as fast as it can and homes in Lehi still run around seven hundred thousand. He blamed tariffs on building materials, and the workers we've lost: "Those that are willing to do that hard work are being booted out of our country. This does not help us."
Riley came back to size (1:08:00). Utah's average home is about 2,800 square feet, the biggest in the country. Then he quizzed the room. In 1960, fifty-two percent of thirty-year-olds were married and owned a home. What is it today? Kent guessed fourteen. "Twelve. Good job, Kent. You get a cookie after this." Shana tested him (1:09:55). "In the 1950s, the US government actually built a lot of those small homes that people were able to move into. So is that something that you would support?" Riley: "No." He'd rather expand the tax credit and let private builders compete.
That's when Chris stepped in (1:11:15). "So I'm gonna interrupt. How does this affect veterans?" Rosemary: "Well, a first-time home buyer may very well be a veteran." Shana: "Let's talk about economics. My bad." Then the table found its way home. Jonny: "Rose Park was built for World War II veterans coming home." Rosemary: "Washington Terrace was built for veterans coming home." And Dave, who lives in Washington Terrace, finished it. Those are "perfect, small houses," already standing. "Why did the legislature not allow those houses to be included in their incentive program? I mean, that's something that I will work for."
I came in wanting to expand the grant, and I still want benefits that keep pace with what homes actually cost. But I haven't stopped thinking about Riley's apples.
Funding veteran nonprofits (1:12:45)
What standards should a nonprofit meet before it gets state money? Kent was honest that it sits outside a DA's lane. But he talked about how isolating it was when he separated, how few combat veterans become attorneys, and how being around other veterans was "nourishing for my soul." He gave a shout-out to the Pat Tillman Foundation and said Irreverent Warriors sounded right up his alley.
Rosemary, who sat on the Social Services Appropriations Committee, said the state likes funding buildings and hates funding operations. Her idea: run ongoing partnerships through the Department of Veterans Affairs, maybe under the ombudsman. "Is that veteran enough for you?" she asked Chris.
I've been on the other side of this. I've sat with a veteran nonprofit trying to get off the ground and heard "come back in three years when you've proven yourself," while groups that have been around for twenty years get thirty thousand here and a hundred thousand there. We can check legitimacy through charity ratings and the Department of Commerce and keep the predators out, and there are predators chasing veterans' money. But somebody has to back the people who saw a need and showed up. Harm reduction, scuba, skiing, or just community. Chris wants funding tied to measurable results and tangible things, like a trailer to get out and visit veterans, instead of open-ended operating money. Nothing's worse, he said, than "ninety percent is operation costs, ten percent helped vets." Rosemary noted those metrics are already standard for state appropriations. They just need to be monitored.
Long-term care and cemeteries (1:20:40)
Rosemary said money was appropriated last session for a veterans cemetery up north, and Dave said one is slated within walking distance of his home. Chris said the cemetery in Bountiful is running out of room. My point was that none of this should catch anyone by surprise. We know how many veterans live in Utah and how old they are. Planning twenty or thirty years out isn't a data problem. It's a vision problem.
Riley gave the most honest answer of the night (1:23:40). "This is not an issue I've thought about or studied or looked at the data on." Then he said the best way to honor veterans is to care for them while they're alive. Jonny reminded us that the costs of war run twenty, thirty, forty years down the road, long after people forget why. Kent noted the county jail was built in 2000, was supposed to grow with the population, and still hasn't twenty-six years later. There's reason to be concerned.
Service-exposure cancers (1:25:10)
I asked if we could talk about before we die instead.
In 2020, at the height of COVID, my husband noticed a mole on my back that didn't look like a mole. It looked like a running man. He took a picture, I sent it to my primary care doctor at the VA, and I heard back within an hour. A week and a half after the biopsy, I was in surgery, with surgeons from the Huntsman Cancer Institute brought into the Salt Lake VA. We complain about the VA a lot, and plenty of it is earned. But once you're connected, the Salt Lake VA is pretty great.
Someone who was supposed to be on that panel— a person I served with in the Utah National Guard— is in chemo for melanoma right now. That's the fifth person I served with in the Guard diagnosed with melanoma, just from my generation. Burn pits. The water at Camp Lejeune. K-2. We were exposed, and we're still paying for it.
So here's what I want. Utah already has the University of Utah, the Huntsman Cancer Institute, and a VA connected to both. Make Salt Lake a national center of excellence for service-exposure cancers, and have our congressional delegation bring home the funding to make it real.
Jonny shared his own story (1:29:10). The VA covered his eighty-thousand-dollar cancer surgery in full, done by one of the handful of surgeons in the country who can do it, right here at Huntsman. He liked the idea. Then he made a point I agree with completely. There are combat veterans who can't use the VA right now because they make a little too much money. "That's garbage. They should absolutely be free-enrolled."
Chris, who has worked as a deputy coroner, put it simply. The care before we die matters more than anything after.
The audience takes over (1:32:50)
Then the room got its turn, and it got real.
A woman who married into a Native American family, many of them veterans, asked us to tear down the silos between the VA, the Indian Health Service, state workers' comp and county homeless services (1:33:40). Those walls are "strictly administrative," she said. "They're artificial." She asked for veteran status on the census, for universal healthcare, and— to pay for more Veterans Courts— for sunsetting MIDA.
Riley took it first (1:36:10). Veteran status on the census? "Absolutely. That's a no-brainer... I don't see that being a contentious issue." He mentioned his uncle is Navajo, then took her point about silos further: every American gets the runaround from government. He's excited about America.gov, a new site the current administration launched with an AI back end that pulls together "twenty-two thousand different government websites," so someday you could upload your documents and be told exactly where to go. "If we modernize and digitize and introduce AI in responsible ways with the appropriate guardrails and regulations, first and foremost protecting individuals' data, I'm really optimistic." Jonny said we owe Indigenous people far more than they've been given.
I'm less optimistic about AI, and I said so (1:39:00). "I do love AI. It serves its purpose. It's great at correlating data, if it doesn't hallucinate. But at the same time, I don't think that is always our answer." My credit union's AI canceled my card when I called to check the balance. "I'm like, 'No, no. Stop, stop, stop it.' Well, it did it!" I went a whole weekend without a debit card. Jonny, never one to miss an opening, asked me how many E's are in seventeen. What I want is "an actual person you can call that's human, not beep, beep, boop," and an office you can walk into, which is the whole point of the ombudsman. Riley sees the upside of AI first. I see my debit card. That's fine. That's what the night was for.
Then an Army retiree took the mic (1:41:45). His last appointment with his active-duty provider at Hill Air Force Base was in November. It took nine months to see a provider at the Salt Lake VA, and in between he rationed his medication for five months because he couldn't get a prescription renewed. "It's unacceptable," he said. Then he asked: "Why isn't it the case that when I come off active duty, retired, ETS, whatever it is, I'm not automatically registered with the VA? How is that not the most intuitive?" He put it in terms every service member in the room understood. "We do it every time we PCS... You show up, they give you a desk, your job, and your new friends. It should be the same way when you come off active duty."
Jonny answered him first (1:43:20). "It is a problem, brother. You shouldn't have gone through that." He backed auto-enrollment and pointed to the VA cuts— "thousands of schedulers, and thousands of our registered nurses being removed"— with mental health hit hardest, and said women veterans likely wait even longer. "Doesn't matter where you come from or what you believe, we have each other's backs, and we don't leave anyone behind."
I took the enrollment piece (1:45:15). "That absolutely can be done. I mean, didn't we just change the law for automatic enrollment into the selective services?" If the government can automatically register young men for a draft, it can automatically enroll veterans in the care they earned. "We know exactly who everyone is and when they retire." All they have to do is "click our profile from active or guard to veteran, and your whole file should be able to transfer over." And every state contact point— caseworkers, the jails— should ask one question: "Are you a veteran?"
Dave added a wrinkle (1:48:15). "You said retired, right?" Retirees get treated differently, he said— "I'm not justifying the system at all"— because the assumption is that your retirement benefits will cover you. His dad is eighty-seven, flew in Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, and only started going to the VA two years ago.
Luke Maynes, who isn't a veteran, asked how officials who've never served can keep veterans in the conversation (1:49:35). Jonny said go listen to them, the same way men shouldn't decide women's issues without women in the room. Riley said he'd called his brother, a medical resident who treats veterans, before coming that night, and warned that most people's picture of the military is "a parade or a museum." Chris said walk into your local VFW, Legion or DAV and ask for coffee. Kent said Chris had nailed it. The real value is knowing where veterans gather. My answer: hire a veteran (1:52:50). From the governor's office to every city hall, put a veteran on your staff, ideally a broken one like me who has lived through the trauma and come out the other side.
Then MIDA (1:53:50). An audience member asked whether MIDA is doing what it's supposed to, and Chris asked someone to explain what it is first. "So I guess as a public affairs specialist, I'll explain MIDA." The Military Installation Development Authority was created in 2007, in the base-closure era, to protect Hill Air Force Base. I told the room what I think it became: "an unaccountable rogue agency" that "was given way too much power, and has gone way beyond its original mission." In the military we call that mission creep. My fixes: pull it under the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs so GRAMA and public access rules apply, require at least half its board to have served, and give the public a comment period. Then I said the part that's personal. "As a veteran, I don't know about you, but I'm offended by MIDA. I would almost call it stolen valor," because as far as I know, only one person on its board has served.
Dave had the inside view (1:56:40). "I'm familiar with MIDA. It's Hill Air Force Base. I've worked in the facilities." MIDA "exists because Congress doesn't do its job" and fund what Hill needs, he said, and it began as a good partnership between the base and the community. "But I agree with Drew. MIDA was hijacked. It was hijacked by the legislature, unaccountable." What it was doing in Box Elder County, he said, "has nothing to do with the military. It should never have been done."
The last question came from Russell Nora (1:57:45), a sixteen-year Army veteran and real estate investor in Weber County. He took issue with two things from the panel: pushing investors out of the market, and the pitch about cheap homes in Ogden. He buys those houses. "Yes, that's why they're two hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty. But I'll tell you what, I won't put my own kids in that house." Shouldn't there be programs for veteran investors who want to fix up homes for veteran families?
Rosemary pointed him to the Rocky Mountain Housing Fund's shared-equity model (1:59:05). Expanding it to veterans "would not require legislation, it would just require some money investment," and "they help you get into a house that you choose." Russell had already looked into it. When he nearly became homeless himself, he said, "in order for the VA to really help me, I either, one, had to be on drugs, or two, I had to actually be homeless." He wants to buy homes for veteran families and hire veterans to fix them up. "There's nobody else to help a veteran than a veteran." Jonny: "One hundred percent, bro."
Shana clarified where she stands (2:03:00). "I'm not, like, totally opposed to home investors. I am one myself. I own a second home too." Her problem is people with millions buying up neighborhoods, and software companies "engaging in rental price collusion." She also took on what she hears on the campaign trail about immigration and home prices. "Why are we focusing on hiring immigrants when we could be hiring our veterans?"
Riley suggested we take the rest of it offline, and Chris checked the clock. It was 9:10. We'd run ten minutes over because the room wasn't done talking.
Closing statements (2:06:35)
Jonny talked about his opponent, Rep. Kennedy, not holding town halls, and said Kennedy once tried to have a constituent removed by police for sitting in the audience shaking his head. Jonny said he mostly talks to Republicans and right-leaning independents, because "we need to get back to a time where we actually work on the ninety percent of the issues that we agree on instead of continuing to fight on the ten percent we don't." Shana said the military prepared her for this, and that she loves confronting people. Kent said he never planned to run. People he respects asked him three days before the filing deadline, and he'd have been ashamed to say no because he was too comfortable. Then he gave us the line of the night: "Vote for the job, not the label."
Riley said he's held about two dozen town halls in nine months, just got engaged, and is asking the same questions as everyone his age. How do we afford a home? Is corruption normal? Will AI take our jobs? Every generation has to get involved, he said. Rosemary reminded us our founding documents start with "We the people," and two hundred fifty years later we still haven't fully lived up to that— "but I think this group is ready to do that." Shane talked about bringing strategic leadership to the county jail. Dave said the legislature has insulated itself from the people, pointing to Better Boundaries, Medicaid and collective bargaining, and he wants to restore their voice.
I talked about the through line of my life, which has been service, and I asked everyone in the room to raise a hand and promise to vote, and to bring one other person with them.
What I took home
Look at what eight veterans from two parties agreed on in one night. Keep the disabled veteran property tax exemption statewide and out of county hands. Expand Veterans Court past the districts that have it, and measure whether it works. Put veteran status on the census. Enroll veterans in the VA automatically when they leave. Stop cutting one generation's benefits to pay for another's.
We didn't agree on housing. We didn't agree on AI. We definitely didn't all see the war the same way, and Jonny and Dave said things about it that some people in that room probably didn't want to hear. The conversation kept going anyway. That isn't the panel failing. That's the panel working. Honest disagreement between people who took the same oath is the process, and it's exactly what we should be celebrating.
I walked out with more to carry into the legislature, not less: the ombudsman office, the cancer center, MIDA reform, an endowment for veteran nonprofits, and one question at every intake point. I also walked out with seven people I'd want in the room when those bills get written, three of them Republicans.
We want to do this again. Next year I want to bring together veterans who already hold office, from city councils to Congress, for an accountability town hall. Then in 2028, a candidate forum again, at every level.
Thank you
None of this happened on its own. Dive Into Healing paid to rent the venue— full disclosure, it's a veteran scuba nonprofit I helped start. Taylor Audio Visual donated the audio, lighting and staging. Irreverent Warriors brought a flag for every branch, and yes, Chris made sure we all noticed the Army flag stood tallest. The VFW Department of Utah presented the night, and Chris Meador and VFW Post 1274 kept eight candidates close to sixty seconds. Mostly. Thank you to the volunteers and veterans who showed up to set everything up, and to the seven veterans who sat at that table with me.
Before you go: vote
However you vote, make sure your ballot counts.
Ballots have been mailed to active registered voters. If yours hasn't shown up, call your county clerk.
Not registered yet? The deadline is Friday, October 23, at 5 PM. After that, you can still register and vote in person on Election Day, as long as you bring two forms of ID: one that shows who you are and one that shows where you live.
Early voting in Salt Lake County runs October 20 through October 31 at the County Government Center, 2001 S. State Street. More locations, including West Jordan City Hall and Draper City Hall, open October 27 through 30 from 3 to 7 PM.
Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.
Your ballot has to reach your county clerk by 8 PM on Election Day. A postmark doesn't count anymore. Drop it in an official ballot drop box before the deadline, and don't wait for the last day.
Check your registration, find a drop box, or track your ballot at vote.utah.gov.
In his first thirty seconds, Jonny said his oath to the Constitution never expires. Not one of us swore that oath to a party. For two hours on October 14, we remembered that.
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