South Valley Community picnic and meet your candidate night: Gibbons Park, Nibley, Wed July 29

 Our Community Cache Valley and the Cache Valley Chapter of the League of Women Voters will host our second community picnic and candidate night of the summer on Wednesday, July 29, at 5:30-8:00 at the north picnic pavilion of Virgil Gibbons Heritage Park, 2456 S 800 W,  Nibley.  Candidates who have confirmed include people running for U. S. Congress, State House District 5, State Senate District 1, Cache County Council Southeast District 7, Cache Water District Board at-large seat, Cache County School Board District 4, and the State Board of Education.    

We hope you can attend and let folks in your towns know about this.  We will have brief comments from each candidate and plenty of time to speak with candidates and community members in the informal setting of a summer picnic! 

The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan group that has worked for voter education and voter registration for over 100 years.  Our Community Cache Valley fosters conversations regarding important public policy issues in Cache Valley.  

Audio of strato forum July 14, 2026

KNOWLEDGE: Recording of the Stratos Forum June 14, 2026 Brigham City

Monumental Monday, July 20

Protests of the recent reduction of area of Bear Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments in Ogden, Salt Lake City, Moab, Provo and St. George.

SUWA is hosting a Monumental Statewide Day of Action this Monday! Bring your friends, a sign (we’ll provide some too), and be ready to raise your voice against the Utah politicians who supported Trump's actions—reducing both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.

Note: SUWA advocates strongly for protecting Utah’s wild lands with strategies that meaningfully engage all cultures and abilities. We do so respectfully and firmly and we act within the law. We do not condone violence or destruction of property.
Join us on Monday in the town nearest you! See you then.

 Ogden, 5:00-6:00 pm near Rep. Blake Moore’s office at the SW corner of 25th St. and Washington Blvd.

Candlelight vigil for victims of ICE violence Ogden July 19

 

Words have Power: Some random ideas

 WORDS Have Power

LOOTING and PLUNDERING:  

What the entire Federal Utah Delegation does to our public lands.  They were at an unhinged press conference when an illegal order to gut two Utah national monuments occurred.  False statements were made about hunting and fishing, and about whether anyone can even walk in these lands.

PBS newshour report

A more thorough analysis is here:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rod Moser (@utah.grit)

President Trump and the entire Utah delegation is looting and plundering our public lands. 

Vote them out and let them know how you feel about this shocking corruption. 

The primary direct beneficiary and lobbyist for reducing the monument may be Energy Fuels Resources (USA) Inc.. 

 
Mining companies and coal companies want to desecrate our public lands.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rod Moser (@utah.grit)

ABOLISH ICE!  There is no other solution

DHS federal agents are trained to behave exactly the way they are, killing innocent people and covering up their crimes.  

Listen to the Left Hook interview Jenn Bunn, former Border patrol agent and current whistle blower.
Artist name and link  Source

ABOLISH ICE! by THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

There's no other moral, humane, or clear position than abolish ICE as a way of protecting our streets, our citizens, and our immigrants from a lawless, murderous agency trained to terrorize & oppress.

Read on Substack

View this post on Instagram

Number one Guardian of Pedophiles: Todd Blanche

Personal lawyer to convicted felon and rapist.

Todd Blanche is completely unqualified to be a practicing lawyers before the Courts, let alone the Attorney General.  

Liz Oyer says it well.

https://www.lawyeroyer.com/p/why-does-todd-blanche-keep-protecting 

https://www.lawyeroyer.com/ 

https://www.isthisreallylegal.org/ 

Two videos.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Liz Oyer (@lawyer_oyer)

A post shared by Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (@judiciarydems)

In summary:

We've read Liz Oyer’s letters and exposes. I oppose Todd Blanche for Attorney General. He is a lawless loyalist who has NOOOOOOo place in possession of a law license, let alone leading the Department of Justice. 

He perpetrated fraud on the court in the IRS fake lawsuit case.  

Blanche violated the Epstein transparency act in some of the most flagrant ways imaginable. 

Child rapists are being protected by Blanche and company.  

We needs new lawmakers who will hold him and his cronies accountable.

ACTION-TODAY until July 27th by 5 pm :Stratos opponents can also oppose permit for ANOTHER DATA CENTER AAARRRG!

Oppose permit for ANOTHER DATA CENTER in Tooele area in wetlands of Great Salt Lake

Artist

UPDATE:   Public meetings about water permit for another disastrous Data Center are scheduled. 

Copied from Environmental Ministry of First Church UU's (down to red stars)

Find out more at the source https://www.stopthepollutingport.org/proposed-tooele-inland-port

It's been a brutal few weeks for Utah. The state is in a declared drought emergency after the warmest winter and lowest snowpack on record, wildfires have burned more than 357,000 acres statewide, and on July 8 a dust plume off the Great Salt Lake pushed Wasatch Front air quality to hazardous levels, carrying arsenic and other metals from the exposed lakebed.

This is what a drying Great Salt Lake looks like. It's the backdrop for a permit decision that would add more industrial demand on a closed water basin and more pollution headed toward the wetlands the lake has left.

Please join us at a public hearing in two weeks that determines whether this damaging development will move forward.

The Utah Division of Water Quality has scheduled a hearing on a proposed permit that would authorize 252,000 gallons per day of industrial brine discharge—reject water from a reverse osmosis system serving a data center campus in Tooele Valley—into wetlands that drain directly to Great Salt Lake.

The discharge route enters an actively monitored Intermountain West Shorebird Survey area on the south shore of Great Salt Lake. 

This industrial development is being made possible through public financing provided by the Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA), which is modeled after the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA).

PUBLIC HEARING: UPDES  Permit UT0026409 Monday, July 27, 2026 5:45 pm — Informational session 6:00 pm — Hearing begins Multi-Agency State Office Building, 195 N 1950 W, Salt Lake City, Board Room 1015 Join online: meet.google.com/mfd-hrau-eqn Written comments also due July 27 (close of business) Email: wqcomments@utah.gov | Reference: Permit UT0026409

Here's what you can do:

• Come to the hearing, in person or online. Showing up builds the public record and sends a signal about who is paying attention.

• To speak, sign in when you arrive. Two minutes is enough. Say you oppose the permit, name the wetlands and the birds, the cumulative impacts that this enables and ask DWQ to deny or substantially revise it.

• Send a written comment by July 27. Email wqcomments@utah.gov, reference permit UT0026409. A sentence or two is fine. Your words matter more than you think.

Why this permit is a problem:

• The brine discharge contains arsenic and will enter Class 5E transitional wetlands with zero dilution

• DWQ reclassified the receiving water without public notice

• No pre-discharge baseline monitoring has been conducted

• The full antidegradation analysis is incomplete

• No air quality permit has been filed for the 500-megawatt gas power plant that would serve the data center campus

Bottom line: The Utah Division of Water Quality should not finalize this permit until the cumulative impacts, downstream protections, and real-world testing have occurred.

This is $234 million in public subsidy, UIPA tax increment financing plus tax-exempt bonds through two Public Infrastructure Districts, going to a development that begins with a diesel truck stop next to a shorebird wetland and ends with a gas-fired data center the size of a small power plant.

The hearing is the public’s opportunity to put that on the record. Please join us!

For more info go here.

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Knowledge: Utah's economy and environment will suffer if Stratos Data Center is built

Collected impacts of Stratos project exposed

Some updated on July 15, 2026

The Stratos project will have major negative impacts on the following:

• GREAT SALT LAKE, which is in such a crisis that our state's economy is predicted to collapse as the lake stays in an unhealthy condition.

• WATER in our basin will be consumed (see this article in Deseret News)

• Air pollution will increase and blow across 2.5 millions lungs downwind.  Wind Roses show that the dominant wind blows right at Ogden area from Stratos through a low set of hills with low passes.  See numbers here

• CARBON POLLUTION will increase astronomically

• Water pollution comes from many processes of this industrial project

• ECOLOGY will be degraded, impacting many living things. and especially the millions of birds that paude on migration on the lake.  They migrate through nearby.

• Scorching HEAT from using natrual gas for energy production will turn an arid sage land into a Sahara-like hyper-arid desert
• 
  

Problems with Stratos, data centers and power plants that are little discussed:

TOXIC WASTE:

• Toxic waste results from many processes and activities at the Stratos site.
• 
  
• There is the need to replace computers every few years, creating a toxic waste problem of enormous proportion.  
• This is called e-waste.  It is toxic.

ENERGY? 

• Lack of sufficient energy to power the proposed project will potentially create problems for regional energy supply.

Military claim? 

• Is there actually a military component of the project?  This is critical and some critics questions that a smidge of military land across the lake, 40-some miles away makes this Stratos project a military one.

Beyond these known risks, there is little discussion of the geologic hazards that could potentially cause construction costs to skyrocket or might damage the delicate computers of Stratos and/or threaten the explosive fuel of the power plant if they are not addressed properly by professionals

Did you know that the Stratos project would be built on a young shield volcano, in an active section of two over-lapping seismic belts, and atop liquefied deposits? All three are geologic hazards that drive up costs of construction. 

Figure 1. Dr Janecke's map of the seismic belts near the Stratos data center and selected active normal faults in red. From a draft manuscript about the Benson swarm of earthquakes. in west central Cache Valley.  Refer to figure 2 for the outline of the Stratos project.

Figure 2. Stratos Project's booster plan to plunk their delicate infrastructure in one of the most active seismic belts east of the San Andreas fault system-the Yellowstone seismic parabola. Hansel Valley and Pocatello Valley earthquakes shook this area in the last century and repeats are inevitable.  


In addition, the Stratos Project is within one of the young volcanic fields of Utah.  It is called the NW Utah Volcanic field. Even if the numerous volcanoes in the project footprint stay quiet, there could be an eruption from one of the nearby volcanic centers. 

Find out more about the Geologic Hazards that Stratos boosters overlooked at :

Tinyurl.com/StratosEarthquakesAndMORE

Volcanoes of the Stratos project area have notably fresh and active eruptive centers on top. Both shield volcanoes shown here were under the powerful destructive waves of Lake Bonneville, which rose about 30,000 years ago and evaporated into the Great Salt Lake about 13-15,000 years ago. 
Round craters and eruptive centers are so fresh that Post- or maybe syn-Bonneville eruptions explain the fresh and round craters and eruptive centers on top of these two shield volcanoes. That morphology makes future eruptions more likely.   This is an unpublished map by Dr. Susanne Janecke. Please cite this blog post and her name if you use it.

Explore more information

Screenshot of an amazing web site that is not online anymore. 
The wayback machine archived it-luckily for us.  

Find a treasure trove of information here:

 at https://tinyurl.com/STOPUTDataCenterCORRUPTION 

Thank you creator of this infographic. Weber County Women's Caucus




Data centers AND gas-powered power plants use a LOT of water.  Yet: 

Utah's water situation is in crisis.  We are in severe to extreme drought across the entire state.  95% of the state is in top three dry levels:  severe, and extreme drought.

Roughly 2000 Utahns came to have their voices heard in opposition to the Stratos Project.  their leaders disrespected them, threatened to have them arrested, and then fled their own private but televised meeting.  Does such a meeting meet the requirements of the open meetings laws?

Desiccated lakes look like this.  IT is grim.

NOTICE:  None of these MIDA people have technical or environmental or hazards training.
Call them out for approving a rushed sketch of a plan with only a miniscule (or possibly zero?) military connection. 
MIDA has been allowed to act without oversight. 
The single board meeting about Stratos revealed a shocking lack of analysis, discussion, care, or true interest in the people of Utah.
No 

environmental

 considerations came up in the meeting. 
No economic analysis came up in the meeting.
No air pollution concerns came up in the meeting.
The enormous water-guzzling nature of data centers of large size did not appear to be discussed.

Land-owners, who are likely to benefit-appeared to be the only members of the public in their very brief discussion.

MIDA built a luxury hotel using our tax moneys.  They pretended to be helping the military.  

FOLLOW THE MONEY:

Stuart Adams "just happened" to get his largest ever political donations 7 days after latest MIDA "military-support-plan-without-miltiary-contracts-or contiguous-military land" plan was approved.

See Reporting by Bryan Schott here.

GOP leader are not looking fresh as daisies vis-a-vie donors

Governor Cox:  Schott report

The bottom line.  Utah's GOP leadership hatched the project plan before they shopped it around and asked O'Leary to lead it.

Cox, Adams, Stevenson, and many others in the Utah legislature assumed that you and I would roll over to yet another scam that harms the state, steals our tax money for the SOLE benefit of insiders.

Thank you to the creator of this graphic.

Candidate bios

Cache Water District Board

Logan area District 3

Alanna Nafziger

Hey there! My name is Alanna Nafziger and I’m running for Cache Water District Seat #3. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you know a bit about me from my recent Logan mayoral run. The short version is, I’m deeply rooted here, I care about my community and act on that every time I can within my unique circumstance. For years that has brought me to consider how we use and value water in Cache Valley and how that fits within our community, our bioregion, and the Great Salt Lake watershed. I have a master’s degree in landscape architecture and am trained in living systems thinking and design. I believe the way we treat our water systems matters deeply to quality of life here in Cache Valley and that complex water issues presented by drought, flooding, human consumption, aging infrastructure and stormwater management deserve intentional solutions that foundationally integrate ecology and wellbeing. I would love to collaboratively work towards these solutions, strengthening water conservation, river restoration and pioneering frameworks and policies that align with real needs and acknowledge the constraints of the incredible place we live. I’m running to be a board member of the Cache Water District to enact real change with lasting benefits. I would love to have your vote.

Cache County Council

District 2

Joann Bennett

Born and raised in southern Idaho in a family that valued education and was involved in Agriculture. My family took an interest in government affairs. One in my family served in the Idaho Legislature representing Bear Lake County. My late husband received a PhD at USU then built, owned and operated a very large greenhouse growing millions of long stemmed roses in Layton. I have lived in Logan for the past 12 years. I've enjoyed attending city and county council meetings through the years. Served on Cache County Council in seat 2 since January 2026. Attended UAC meetings at the legislature during the 2026 session and the UAC Legislative Summary Conference in St George 3 months ago. I love learning and meetings!

Alison Goulais


District 3

Sandi Goodlander

My husband Phil and I love the community of Logan, and are small business owners who have lived in Cache County for 17 years. I graduated from USU in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. During my senior year I served as an intern for Senator Lyle Hillyard during the Utah state legislative session. This was an amazing experience which allowed me to learn firsthand about the legislative process in Utah, as well as being mentored by Senator Hillyard who was serving as chair of the Appropriation Committee at the time.

After graduation I worked as a legislative assistant for two years, and was then appointed to serve on the Logan City Planning and Zoning Commission. The five years I spent on the P&Z Commission was a great opportunity to continue my education, particularly pertaining to land use law and good growth practices.

In 2022 I was elected to represent my district on the County Council where I am currently serving in my second year as chair. The Council is tasked with many responsibilities, but the one that is the most important to me is managing the yearly budget. We have exceptional elected officials in our county government, and I am proud to work alongside them as well as with my fellow Council members.

Cache County is a special place where six of my nine grandchildren live. I hope to help shape our community into a place where they will be able to thrive and grow.


Mark Nafziger

Greetings! My name is Mark Nafziger. I’m a psychologist, and have worked in Utah State University’s Counseling and Prevention Services for almost 36 years. I love Logan and Cache Valley, and am running for Logan Seat 3 on the Cache County Council. I hope to use the skills and knowledge I’ve developed during my career to serve my community and to help protect Cache County’s character and quality of life during the challenging times ahead.

I grew up in Ohio, and moved to Utah in 1990 after completing my Ph.D. at Ohio State University. In addition to counseling USU students, for the past 35 years I’ve volunteered for the State of Utah’s Critical Incident Stress Management Team. The CISM team provides debriefings and educational presentations to emergency services workers (police, firefighters, EMT’s etc.) dealing with job-related traumatic experiences.

I’ve been married to my wife Cleo, a Utah native, for 45 years. We have five grown children and four growing grandchildren. I spend much of my free time gardening and doing yard work, walking (often with my dog Tavi), and enjoying Cache Valley’s mountains.

State Legislature District 3

Patrick Belmont

Patrick Belmont is a professor, watershed scientist, dad, neighbor, and independent candidate for the Utah Legislature. He is running because he believes politics should be less about a battle of teams and identities, and more about listening carefully, asking the right questions, and bringing people together to navigate challenges.

Patrick has spent his career studying water, wildfire, energy, and how communities can make better long-term decisions. All things that are sorely lacking in our Legislature. As an elected official, his priorities would include protecting Utah’s water, improving air quality, supporting public education, making housing and basic needs more affordable, and ensuring growth in Cache Valley strengthens our community rather than overwhelms it.

He also believes we need leaders who are willing to tell the truth about hard problems without turning neighbors against each other. Patrick’s goal is to bring steadiness, independence, and a deep commitment to the people of Cache Valley into the Legislature. He will work to put people over politics, protect the places we love, and make sure families, teachers, workers, small businesses, and future generations have a real voice in the decisions shaping Utah's future.

Jason Thompson

U. S. House of Representatives CD-2

Peter Crosby

Peter Crosby is a husband and father, who with his wife Amanda, have raised their three daughters here in Northern Utah. He comes from a military family, where he was taught that public service is a duty and there is no higher value than integrity. While his own military career was cut short due to an injury while in the ROTC at the University of Utah, that commitment to community and country has continued to follow him.

Peter has a professional background that started in operations with a Fortune 500 company, where he led multiple teams, including projects where he directed a staff of 11 in support of over 200 employees and annual revenues between $12-15 million. He left the private sector to work as a professional staff member at Utah State University for eight years. He maintains his ties to the university as an adjunct professor teaching American institutions and is now supporting the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence with his work on emergent technology and systems thinking. He is currently a director and project manager for a privately owned company on the East Coast, supporting research in higher education.

Northern Utah is Peter’s home, his neighborhood, and his community. He is running for Congress because our neighborhoods deserve steady, common-sense leadership focused on providing real solutions to the problems hitting us the hardest. From lowering the rising cost of living to protecting our Great Salt Lake, Peter is committed to delivering honest leadership and real accountability through transparent representation.

Blake Moore