Your Utah, Your Future
Over a two-month period, 52,845 Utahns shared their voice through the Your Utah, Your Future survey. The survey results were cross-checked against a random-sample survey to ensure they represented the desires and opinions of Utahns. The survey engaged a broad cross section of Utahns in terms of location, age, income, gender, education level, and ethnicity.
The survey found that Utahns have high expectations for the future and want to accomplish great things across most issues. These expectations include having a prosperous and healthy future in safe, neighborly communities, while carefully preserving Utah’s natural beauty and resources.
Regardless of their demographic or location, Utahns generally have unified expectations for the goals that should be set.
Expectations come with a solid understanding and willingness to make the sacrifices required to reach these ambitious goals.
Overall Scenarios
The survey presented Utahns with five overall scenarios to choose among, each named after a Utah symbol:
- Allosaurus: We do not implement strategies to achieve a vision of the future. Individuals, businesses, cities, counties, and other groups work separately to further their own interests.
- Bonneville Trout: Utahns continue doing what we’re doing now. Our actions are the same as those in recent years. However, the outcomes of our future choices may not be the same as today because of growth and changing circumstances.
- Seagull: Utah makes targeted individual and collective efforts to keep the economy and quality of life strong, without making significant changes or large investments.
- Quaking Aspen: Utah becomes more economically resilient through economic diversification, connections to economies around the country and world, improved resilience to natural disasters, and increased ability to rely on local energy and food.
- Sego Lily: Utahns minimize their impact on the environment, conserve resources, and focus on improving both environmental and community health.
Each overall scenario proposed a set of choices for each of the 11 specific topics. After making selections for each of the 11 topics, participants could study a summary comparison chart and vote on their preferred overall scenario.
Scenario Choices
About half of Utahns voted for the Quaking Aspen scenario. Another quarter or so voted for Sego Lily, and Seagull captured more than 10% of the vote. Very few people voted for Bonneville Trout or Allosaurus.
The Quaking Aspen scenario was made up of the following characteristics for the various topics:
- Jobs & Economy: Very strong economy
- Education: Significant, strategic investment increase; Utah in top 10 states
- Disaster Resilience: Much greater resilience to earthquakes, fire and floods
- Recreation: More trails, campgrounds, etc.; tourism promoted; little crowding
- Energy: Natural gas, renewables, and nuclear; 12% cost increase
- Agriculture: Increased cropland and food self-sufficiency
- Transportation & Communities: Communities designed for walking, transit, short drives, and housing variety
- Housing & Cost of Living: Reasonable housing and transportation costs
- Air Quality: 40% fewer emissions than today; well within health standards
- Public Lands: Balance of high- and low-impact uses (preservation, energy, etc.)
- Water: 25% less use per person; new supply from projects, little form farms; max 30% grass in yards/parks
While Quaking Aspen was the preferred scenario for the overall package of choices, Utahns favored the Quaking Aspen choice on some topics more than others. There was a substantial amount of consensus, for example, in favor of the Quaking Aspen choices for transportation and communities, housing and cost of living, education, air quality, and agriculture.
Click or swipe to scroll left or right.
While Quaking Aspen was the preferred scenario for the overall package of choices, Utahns favored the Quaking Aspen choice on some topics more than others (see pp. 53–54). There was a substantial amount of consensus, for example, in favor of the Quaking Aspen choices for transportation and communities, housing and cost of living, education, air quality, and agriculture.
There was somewhat less consensus, but still a majority, in favor of the Quaking Aspen choices for jobs and economy, public lands, and disaster resilience. Many Utahns favored another scenario for those topics that was similar to Quaking Aspen.
There was less consensus on the topics of energy, recreation, and water. For energy, Utahns broke with Quaking Aspen, which included developing nuclear power, and preferred a different scenario that relied on natural gas and renewable power sources. For recreation, Utahns preferred Quaking Aspen only slightly more than the scenario presented in both Sego Lily and Seagull, which called for less tourism promotion. For water, Utahns exhibited significant consensus in favor of water conservation and protecting agriculture, but differed over how much water to conserve.
More detailed explanations of the scenarios and the favored outcomes of each topic are included in each topic’s vision report.
Level of Concern for the Future
The survey used a technique known as “MaxDiff” to understand the relative priority Utahns place on each of the 11 topics. This technique forced a weighting of the topics based on their importance to each survey participant in light of Utah’s population growth. In the survey, Utahns prioritized jobs and economy, followed by water, air quality, and education.
The survey asked Utahns to weight the topics based on their importance in light of Utah’s population growth. This resulted in a share of 100 points being allocated to each topic according the average level of concern for that topic.
The majority of Utahns selected Quaking Aspen. Those who selected the overall Sego Lily scenario, on the other hand, were more likely to be highly concerned about air quality and energy and less concerned about jobs and economy or taxes. Those who selected Seagull, Bonneville Trout, or Allosaurus were more likely to be concerned about taxes and less likely to be concerned about air quality or energy.