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Candidates for the Utah House District 60 special election talk to members of the public at a meet and greet in the Provo City Library on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023.

Harrison Epstein, Daily Herald

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Candidates for the Utah House District 60 special election are: top row from left, Sylvia Andrew, Joe Brockbank, Tyler Clancy; bottom row from left, McKay Jensen and Jared Oldroyd.

Courtesy photos

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Former Utah Rep. Adam Robertson, R-Provo, talks to attendees during a meet and greet for special election candidates at the Provo City Library on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. Robertson announced he was stepping down from the seat on Dec. 21, 2022.

Harrison Epstein, Daily Herald

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With only weeks between Rep. Adam Robertson’s announcement he was stepping down from his seat in the Utah House to Representatives to the opening of the 2023 legislative general session, officials with the Utah County Republican Party were on a time crunch to hold a special election and fill the seat.

Robertson, a Provo Republican, was joined by five of the special election candidates on Saturday at the Provo City Library for a meet and greet with delegates, who will decide the seat’s inhabitant for the next two years, and other interested members of the public.

Each of the five candidates in attendance came into the race with different experiences, past work and perspectives. McKay Jensen is a former member of the Provo City School Board after losing his 2022 reelection bid; Sylvia Andrew is a former state Senate candidate and a regular attendee of Utah County Commission meetings who has frequently questioned election security; Tyler Clancy is a Provo police officer and is former executive director of the Pioneer Park Coalition, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit; Jared Oldroyd is president of JWO Engineering; and Joe Brockbank has spent 12 years as an arbitration judge at Brigham Young University.

Jensen is the only candidate in the race who has previously held elected office, sitting on the Provo City School Board from 2013 until 2022.

The most important traits he believes he would carry into the Utah House from that experience, if elected, would be practicality and being careful with public statements and legislative language.

“If District 60 is going to have a voice, it needs (to be) somebody who knows how to engage in that process,” Jensen said. “Because I’ve practiced in elected office, I feel I can be a voice. I can shape legislation not just vote up or down.”

He explained that shaping legislation would provide an opportunity for the people of Provo’s needs to be taken more into account. Jensen believes Provo can be a model for Utah’s future in regard to water and property taxes. According to Jensen, better understanding of the property valuation process would help Provo families, as a higher percentage of properties in the city are residential instead of commercial.

“We’re getting a lot of crazy valuations where within a street, this one goes up 5%, this one goes up 40 — and our neighbors talk to each other. That does not lead to good government,” he said. “That 40% increase makes the neighbor mad, but that 40% increase probably catches up to them another time. But that inequity in between just means people are mad at government and, a lot of times, they’re angry at schools because we’re spending so much of that.”

Andrew told the Daily Herald she decided to run for the seat after talking to people in her life and praying for guidance. This is also her second run for office, running in the GOP primary in 2020 against Sen. Curt Bramble. In that race, she says she learned the importance of talking with people and about the issues at the top of their concerns.

She told the Daily Herald that her top priority would be education, specifically giving parents more choice for their child’s education, whether it’s through savings plans or scholarships. Andrew also expressed a desire to find local solutions for homelessness in Utah County.

Calling herself a fiscal conservative, Andrew said she would support cutting taxes “wherever we can cut to give relief to families so they can pay those high gas prices, high food prices.” She is also in favor of removing taxes on food.

Oldroyd entered the special election having never sought public office before, though he has been a GOP delegate in the district and participated in the race Robertson won in 2017. Part of the reason he entered was because of the race’s circumstances.

“This provided an opportunity for a candidate like me who’s an engineer, introvert, someone who wouldn’t normally be putting themself out there in this way to make a difference,” he said.

As a small business owner who works primarily with water infrastructure, Oldroyd believes he has the experience and knowledge to make a difference in the state Legislature. “As an engineer, I have a problem-solving mindset that enables me to say, ‘What are the key things that we have to address? How do we protect the most important things?’ Which are our freedoms, the systems that we’ve put in place to help people,” he told the Daily Herald.

Oldroyd added that, if elected, he would focus on resource issues, namely working with Rep. Keven Stratton to find solutions with Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake, along with education by supporting charter schools and other alternatives to public education in an effort to bolster competition.

Since May 2021, Clancy has been a member of the Provo Police Department. The BYU graduate is the youngest candidate in the field, at 25 years old, and said he would offer a different generational perspective if elected to the Utah House.

“We are the youngest legislative district in the state of Utah. I think that brings unique challenges. I think it brings unique opportunities. I think, with my service as a police officer, my service in the nonprofit community working with state legislators — working in that political arena — and then just being someone who’s still in that in-between, I have an ability to bridge the gap,” Clancy said.

If elected, he said he would lead with “accountability and redemption,” specifically around criminal justice reform. Before becoming a police officer, Clancy worked as executive director of the Pioneer Park Coalition, a nonprofit focused on crime and homelessness in Salt Lake City’s Rio Grande neighborhood.

“The (Justice Reinvestment Initiative) that the Legislature passed a couple years ago I think had really good intentions about bringing people from this idea of incarceration, incarceration to some sort of redemptive process. But both in my previous role and this current role, really what it does is rob people of accountability and so there’s no consequences for criminal behavior,” he said.

Also a first-time candidate, with a background in technology and finance, Brockbank has lived in Provo for our 30 years. But he leans on his work as an arbitration judge, and his focus on the big picture with every issue, as his qualification for the office.

Brockbank told the Daily Herald he would question if a bill was passed with a real purpose or if it’s a “psychological bill” that doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

Additionally, he has labeled himself in the race as a morally and fiscally conservative candidate — meaning he is against abortion, supports the 2022 bill banning transgender girls from participating in sports and wants to “protect the institution of marriage.”

He also considers himself a root-issue person, not someone focused on Band-Aid solutions.

“With homelessness, with high turnover in schoolteachers, with the Great Salt Lake, whatever the issue is — what is the root issue? I’m not going to be one of those guys that says, ‘Oh my gosh, if you vote for me I’m going to solve this problem.’ But I will say, I will study like crazy the root issue,” Brockbank said.

Keeping teachers working in schools is the top priority for Brockbank, who said he wouldn’t want to just hand out raises, but figure out what can be done to help teachers without raising property taxes, adding that he would vote no on almost any tax increase.

A virtual forum will be held via Zoom at 7 p.m. Monday for people interested in hearing from the candidates. There will be another meet-the-candidates held at the Provo Library at 9 a.m. Saturday before the special election is held at 10 a.m.

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