SALT LAKE CITY—When the dust settled on the 2025 Legislative Session that ended March 7 at midnight, a total of 582 bills were left standing. Over the past 45 days, lawmakers pushed their bills and protesters filled the steps of the Capitol trying to make their voices heard. 

“We passed (more than) 500 bills,” said Senate President J. Stuart Adams at a press conference just before the session ended. “That’s what we do every year. It doesn’t matter what we do whether it’s at the beginning of the session, the end of the session, the middle of the session, people think we're exerting control. We pass bills. That’s what we do here.”

“I like seeing protests,” said Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork. “I think it's healthy for the process and we’ve seen worse than this. I go back to 2021. We had protests, we had vandalism out front, we had the Highway Patrol out front.”

That was a difficult year, he said. “But for me, I love having the public involved and having protests.”

There is speculation that there will be a petition drive for a referendum on the labor bill (HB267) that prohibits unions from collective bargaining. “I think that’s part of the process,” said Adams. “We’ll see as it goes through the process so I’m not going to predict.”

Referendums are significantly different from initiatives, he said. “Initiatives are basically difficult because they’re creating laws. With referendums they’re pushing back on us. That’s part of the process. Just like Sen. McKell said about the protesters. We welcome that even though we may not like it. We actually welcome it as part of the process.”

Going into the last few hours of the session, Adams said one thing they would do is balance the budget. “Maybe I will just remind everyone here what we did. We cut taxes in a big way, one more time, again, again and again. But one thing we did is we also funded education. We gave teachers a $1,000 bonus and another $1,000 to support staff and a 4% increase to the WPU. That’s a significant increase.”

So the legislature has done a lot of things, he said. “I think they’re positive and we’re pretty proud of what we’ve done. So it’s pretty amazing to be in Utah where you can cut taxes and fund education at a high level. I think we’re in the top 10 as far as starting teacher salaries in the nation. That wasn’t where we were four or five years ago.”

“I think we’ve been very vocal on the issues that are important,” said Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake County. “We’ve been trying to be positive in the fact that the economy is changing. We’re happy that there’s a childcare tax credit and you know for businesses and also adding another year for the kiddos. That has been some relief to families and businesses.”

And of course, Social Security, she said. “That has been a priority for us. We’re not happy with the income tax cut but we worked really hard on some of the pieces that are a priority for us and some of them were funded.”   

“I’ve said it a lot of times,” said Adams. “The really good thing about the legislature, well I guess the bad thing I guess is that it’s 45 days if you want to do a lot of work. The really good thing is, because it’s 45 days if you want to see a few things die, a few things will die tonight.”