Tami Tran is in her fifth year as mayor of Kaysville. Before that, she was on the Kaysville City Council, and she also spent time on the Kaysville Planning Commission.

“And I thought, ‘This is an open seat, so if I want to serve, now’s the time,'” she said.

Tran said her time as mayor has been educational and a great opportunity to learn what matters to people and how government operates. She’s learned that local politics matters. Local government, she said, makes the biggest difference in people’s lives on a daily basis.

“And I wish more people would pay attention to what goes on locally,” she said. “I know a lot of us get lost in the chaos of the federal government and the news that is constantly coming at us, but really, local government is where your lives are affected on a very real level.”

Ryan Comer, Standard-Examiner

Policy importance

One reason Tran said she would like to go to the Senate is to take the experience she’s learned as both a mayor and a business owner and apply it to creating good policies.

“I think a lot of times, our state lawmakers have great intentions, but they don’t realize the impact of the decisions that they make,” she said.

She said there was a situation in Kaysville that involved school choice. School choice, she said, was great, but the situation presented challenges.

“A microschool bill passed that allowed a microschool entity to have up to 100 kids anywhere in any zone,” she said. “And it seems like, great. You want microschools to be successful and it’s really expensive to buy commercial buildings. It makes sense. Like, yeah, that’s a good idea. The problem was that we had some really great schools in Kaysville that said, ‘OK, so we’re going to buy a house at the end of a dead-end street here and we’re going to put 100 kids in it and we’re going to have two shifts.’ So up to 200 cars. People do carpool, but, you know, quite a few cars coming in and out of this little tiny area in a residential area.

“… And so they came to us and said, ‘Yeah, this state code said we can do this.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me call the bill sponsor.’ So I called the bill sponsor and I said, ‘Was this your intention?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. This other bill three bills ago defines the intention of this bill that came out this year.’ But it was very difficult to connect those dots.

“And it’s not that we’re saying we don’t want microschools. We do, but there are appropriate places and, you know, not appropriate places. If you have a half-acre, you’re on a field, you’re, you know, on a main street or something like that, or you have an acre, you have a big house. Great. Go ahead and do that. But not in the middle of a cul-de-sac.”

Ultimately, Tran said she contacted her House representative, Ariel Defay, and asked her to clean up the bill. A bill file was opened and the bill got passed. But the bill got circled in the Senate, which Tran explained meant it was in a holding place, and if it didn’t get uncircled, it would never come back to the floor.

Tran was 15 minutes from the Capitol, so she texted one of her senators and said she needed to be on the floor with him to uncircle the bill.

“So he said, ‘Yeah, sure, come. I’ll sponsor you.’ Sponsored me on the floor,” she said.

She said it passed and that it was wonderful.

“So it’s a really great process when we have people that are really engaged and understand how it works, and we can get really great things done,” she said.

Housing affordability

Tran said housing affordability is “huge.” She recognizes that everyone wants to be able to afford something and many people have married kids living with them trying to save.

As far as the government’s role, Tran said the proper role is to get out of the way as much as possible.

“And I know that the government feels like it’s their job to try to move the needle on affordability, but the problem is, it doesn’t really help,” she said. “The rates need to come down. I think that they are hard, but the problem is we’ve been spoiled. 2% rate’s not sustainable. 9%, 8.5% rates are what happened when we were first buying our first home, and that seemed like a good deal compared to 13% rates. And so I think there’s got to be some education. But there also needs to be the ability for the local private industry to drive the market. And I think if government gets out of the way, then that will happen.”

She said if government is going to incentivize, it needs to incentivize where it really counts.

She likes the state’s efforts to incentivize single-family homes, but she said in addition to that, if there’s going to be a grant program, it should be opened up for other homes as well.

“And so instead of incentivizing developers to build more, I think that if we’re going to put grant money out there … we should open it up and let people use that money to maybe remodel an existing home and have, you know, a $25,000, $30,000, $50,000 grant to remodel,” she said.

Angry politics

Tran pointed out how angry politics can be but said that’s a motivator for her.

“I think that’s also why I want to get into state politics, because at the local level, we really get along within our communities,” she said. “When you get to state, I think that there’s more headliners, and then you get to the national level, and it’s just total chaos, and it’s just a train wreck that people can’t stop watching.”

Tran said she wants to show the good that government can do.

“I mean, I’m not confrontational,” she said. “I don’t want to start a fight, but if I’m in a fight, I’m going to win it. Right? I’m going to do everything I can to win it. And with a smile. Because I think that politics is just about communicating with each other and talking to people. I’ve learned so much the difference between talking about someone and talking to them. And I think that’s a really powerful lesson. And in politics, I want to bring that, because you hear about, you know, these people and those people, and we’re all the same people. You know, most of us want the same things. We want to take care of our family, we want to be able to earn a living, we want to go out in the mountains and take a hike when we feel like it and we want a happy quality of life. We want to be free to choose. And so we have so much in common. So, yeah, politics, I think, can be really angry. It can look angry. But I think that as a voice in the Senate, I can be someone that can help spread the fact that politics works when we talk to each other and we communicate and we listen.”

Conservative values

Tran highlighted her conservative values, saying she’s pro-life and wants to protect the unborn.

She also said constitutional freedoms were important to her.

“I want to make sure that we maintain and preserve our Second Amendment rights,” she said. “I want to make sure that people can protect their property and their families.”

Closing statement

As part of her closing statement, Tran called a Senate position a big deal.

“There are only 29 senators in the state, and it’s really important to be able to bring relationships and experience and understanding of the process and policy making to the Senate,” she said.

She said if she wasn’t running and was voting for someone else, she would want that person to have relationships and the ability to have the confidence of other people to serve well.

She said a lot of people called her and said they were interested in running but not if she was running because they trust her.

“And that said wonders to me, volumes to me, because there are so many people that are super qualified – you know, current mayors, current city council members, business owners throughout my district,” she said.

She said she feels she has to work even harder than she already planned to work to not disappoint those people.

She said her political experience is a plus, not a negative.

“I understand parliamentary procedure. I have chaired multiple boards and commissions and committees throughout the state. I’m a business owner. I know how to make decisions. I know how to lead. I know how to listen,” she said. “You know, it’s one thing to be aspirational and to say, ‘This is what I’ll do,’ ‘I’ll never vote for this,’ ‘I’ll never vote for that.’ Those words are often words that people have to eat once they get in and really understand what is involved in a bill and the bill-making process and that it’s not so cut and dry. You really have to understand the process. You have to ask the right questions, and I think that that’s really key is to be able to understand which questions to ask and which questions matter.”

For more on Tran and her campaign, visit https://vote4tami.com/.

Contact Standard-Examiner editor Ryan Comer at rcomer@standard.net.