Politics & Government
Lehi’s new city councilor James Harrison, his life in the Foreign Service, family and more
Lehi Free Press publisher Sally Francom interviewed James Harrison, who is one of Lehi’s newest city councilors. His family, upbringing, work with the Foreign Service, and views about his role on the city council were all discussed.
Sally Francom (LFP): James, tell us a little bit about your youth and upbringing. Where did you grow up? Share a little about your educational background, and then talk about your family.
James Harrison: I grew up in Roy, Utah, up in Weber County, just west of Ogden in Riverdale. I lived there from about age five until I graduated from high school. I was the youngest sibling of five. I was the unplanned child for my parents and was 11 years younger than my next oldest sibling. So, I had the benefit of being like an only child, but also the youngest. So, my parents were very relaxed.
LFP: You probably got a lot of good attention.
Harrison: I didn’t really take advantage of it, because I was a pretty good kid and very much a rule follower. I played sports–baseball, basketball and football for the most part. And then in high school, actually, in junior high, in eighth grade, 9/11 happened, and that was very significant for me in my life. I knew at that point I wanted to serve in the military or do something to serve.
LFP: Had any of your relatives or parents served in the military?
Harrison: Yes. All of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers served in the military. My dad served in the Army during the Vietnam era. Luckily, he wasn’t required to deploy to Vietnam, but he was an army captain. I’m the only one in my generation who joined the military. So, when I was 17, I was planning on going to ROTC or West Point– I kind of wanted to just get my foot in the door. So, I joined the Marines, in the delayed entry program, and my parents gave permission, and so I exercised and kind of just worked with the unit in Roy, and then I was accepted to West Point, BYU and George Washington. Those are the three that I applied to and was accepted.
LFP: Which did you choose after high school?
Harrison: I went to West Point as a freshman, and then I went on my mission to Taiwan. While I was in Taiwan, I learned Mandarin. I decided I still want to serve in the military, but I really wanted to go into diplomacy. So, when I got back from my mission, I went to BYU, joined ROTC, got an internship with the State Department and then, once I graduated, went into the Army Reserves, and then took a full-time position in the State Department, and that’s when we moved to Washington, DC.
LFP: When you were at BYU, what was your actual major?
Harrison: My major was Chinese, so I kept up my Chinese language, and then I minored in military science as part of my ROTC degree.
LFP: With the ROTC program, do they require that you spend some time in government service?
Harrison: No. In ROTC, cadets will either go into active duty right out of school or go into the National Guard or Reserve. And since I already had an internship and had a foot in the door with the State Department, I knew that I would be in the reserves, which is one weekend a month and a couple of weeks in the summer. And luckily, because it’s the federal government working with the military, it’s very easy. So, if I had to miss a training, they’re easy to work with.
LFP: So, during your time at BYU, you got married?
Harrison: I did, shortly after my mission. I met my wife in high school. We’re in the same grade, but she was clearly out of my league, and so I never even bothered asking her out on a date at the time. Once I got back from my mission, Facebook was a thing. I noticed she was single, and I reached out, and in classic Utah fashion, we started dating and got married pretty quickly.
LFP: She went to Roy High, too? So, you two have a lot of commonalities that way.
Harrison: Yes, we have the same circle of friends. We knew each other’s background. When we started dating, she was going to Weber State, and I was at BYU, and to avoid the 90-minute travel, we got married on December 23 between semesters, and then she moved down and started UVU.
LFP: What was your first job with the Department of State?
Harrison: Initially, I interned at the Department of State between semesters at BYU in the summer. Once I graduated, I went to Washington, D.C., and worked in the State Department as a trainee. I covered China, geopolitical issues and politics, some counterterrorism and some Africa issues, which was very interesting.
LFP: Were you doing special projects within the State Department, or were you in a certain department doing specific work?
Harrison: I was at “Main State,” and you’re mainly communicating with the embassies abroad, and communicating policy back and forth from the ambassador and his political officers and the embassies. And so, I did that for a little while, and then entered into the Foreign Service. So, after about three and a half years, I went overseas as a Foreign Service officer.
LFP: Your whole family went with you, I assume. Where was your first assignment?
Harrison: It was in Beijing. We were in Beijing for two years, and our youngest daughter was born during that time. My wife came back to Utah and had the baby. I came back for a few weeks, and then she moved back to China with the baby. Then we moved to Tokyo for about three and a half years.
LFP: So, your first assignment was in Beijing, and your second assignment was in Tokyo. So, your Chinese didn’t help you there.
Harrison: It didn’t as much, although the kanji, but the characters in Japanese, are similar to Chinese. Yeah, the Japanese language is very much adopting different languages and putting them together.
LFP: How good are you with kanji? In Chinese, kanji. Are you fluent in writing?
Harrison: In Chinese, my writing is probably the weakest part, because I never really needed to write, but my comprehension and speaking are much better just being a missionary. It’s all about speaking. And I can read, of course. I’ve managed to keep that up. Right now, it’s a little bit rusty.
LFP: When you were in Japan, was your role there similar to your work in Beijing?
Harrison: Yes, I was working as a political officer at the Tokyo embassy, and then about two and a half years into that assignment, I was assigned to Pakistan. That was a year-long assignment, but I had to leave my family in Tokyo, just because you couldn’t bring your family to Pakistan. It was a little too dangerous. I spent a year there. I arrived in Pakistan about two weeks before Afghanistan fell. It was a very dramatic time between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the US. So, I spent about six months during that time in that area.
LFP: Were you staying at the embassy during that time in Islamabad?
Harrison: I was there at the embassy. I had a house outside of the embassy compound, but it was secure, and had a guard, and during the second half of that assignment, I was in Karachi, Pakistan, so opposite and further south, and served at the U.S. consulate there for the last six months.
LFP: How often would you see your family during that year?
Harrison: I think I had two trips back to Tokyo during that assignment.
LFP: How many kids did you have at that point?
Harrison: Three.
LFP: So, wow. Your wife’s a rock star.
Harrison: She is. She is the rock of the home, and she was very patient with all of my traveling and work duties. But she loved Tokyo. The kids loved Tokyo.
LFP: Where did you go after Pakistan?
Harrison: We came back to Utah. We were planning a hiatus here, and our next assignment was going to be in Europe. But in that short period of time after I moved back here, I had a former colleague who works at a Utah startup company called Strider Technologies, and he said, ‘Hey, just come in and meet the team.’ And so, I went over there and very quickly ended up joining Strider. So, I left government altogether.
LFP: When you moved back to Utah, was that to Lehi?
Harrison: It was. My parents lived in Lehi. I co-owned a house with them over in the Dry Creek area. When we’d come back on vacation or home leave, we always came back to Lehi. We knew it pretty well.
LFP: Is that where you live?
Harrison: No, we moved to the Jordan Willows area of Lehi.
LFP: How many years have you lived in Lehi, then?
Harrison: Four years.
LFP: You’re still with Strider Technologies. What kind of company is that?
Harrison: It’s an intelligence company. We collect data from inside China, Russia and Iran, open-source data, and we help companies, governments and universities understand where they’re being targeted by adversarial nations like China and Russia, stealing intellectual property or sensitive data. So, it’s less on the cybersecurity side and more on the human recruitment side. A lot of times, those nation states will sponsor IP theft, and so they’ll find engineers or someone with sensitive expertise in a company, and try to recruit them, then steal their intellectual property. That happens a lot.
LFP: Are you interfacing with international policing agencies, like Interpol, to go after the bad actors in IP theft?
Harrison: I cover Asia Pacific in my role. Our company’s growth and expansion are mostly in Japan and Australia. At the moment, I do talk to the governments of Japan and Australia on a regular basis in providing data to them, but our work is usually a preventative effort, providing data to not just governments, but to companies to help them understand, “hey, who are your top experts that would be very interesting to contact from the perspective of the Chinese government?” Then, they can proactively brief those individuals and help them understand geopolitical threats that can actually affect them and their company.
We provide real data and insight. Sometimes these companies are approached by the FBI, and the FBI will say, “Hey, you have a problem. And they’ll say, “Well, what is the problem? And the FBI says, “We can’t tell you, because it’s classified.”
So, these companies are kind of stuck. They say, “We know there is a problem, but we don’t know what to do about it.” And so, Strider fills that gap with data to help them understand what departments or employees are most at risk, so it helps them have a more holistic picture of how to protect themselves.
LFP: Well, they say data is power, and so if you know who might be a threat to you, or who might want to steal your intellectual property, at that point, you can do more proactively to protect yourselves.
Harrison: Exactly. I saw a figure that in the US alone, there’s about $500 billion worth of IP stolen every year. So, you think of Fortune 10 companies and even universities that are very much at risk. Our goal is to help prevent that type of loss.
LFP: So, are most of your clients corporate?
Harrison: It’s pretty evenly split between universities, corporations and governments. Governments are looking at it on an economy-wide scale. Universities are looking at it from a research perspective, and companies are looking at it from an intellectual property perspective.
LFP: You’ve been out of government service for four years. Do you miss it?
Harrison: I miss aspects of it. It was fun and never boring. You’re moving around quite a bit, but I don’t regret leaving. I love Strider as a company and the mission they have, and I love living here in Lehi.
It’s good to see my kids not have to think about moving every couple of years and saying goodbye to friends.
LFP: Do you still have three kids?
Harrison: Yes.
LFP: What are their ages?
Harrison: My oldest daughter is 14 and goes to Willow Creek. My son is 11, goes to River Rock Elementary, and my youngest daughter is eight, and goes to River Rock too.
LFP: What type of work does your wife do?
Harrison: She’s working on a master’s degree right now. When we moved back to Utah, she was a teacher at Pleasant Grove High School for a while, then she taught at Challenger School for a couple of years, and then she decided she wanted to pursue her master’s degree. So, she’s at home studying and doing her degree.
LFP: What inspired your decision to run for city council? What was the event that spurred that decision?
Harrison: I think there are a couple of things. The first was that I knew Chris Condie. He lives around the corner from me. I was always very inspired by his care and attention to residents, and I asked him questions once in a while, and he would kind of keep me updated.
The other thing that prompted me to run was my commute from Jordan Willows to South Jordan. I naturally noticed a lot of the development, the infrastructure, and the roads, and it led to a lot of questions. There was no “best route” for a while there, especially with 2300 West under construction. I could take one of five different routes to work every day, depending on how bad traffic was. That prompted me to ask questions around–what are the developers responsible for? What goes into approving these massive developments, especially next to very small roads that maybe can’t handle that much development?
Those are the questions that led to my decision. Then, I started following the city council meetings more. Then, of course, earlier this year, when Chris [Condie] decided to run for mayor, I started thinking more about it and decided to jump in.
At the time, I didn’t know a lot of people within Lehi City politics. I was a state delegate for the Republican Party. So, I knew a few folks, and I knew Senator Balderree and Emily Lockhart–I met her when she ran for the State Senate. So, I was involved, but it wasn’t until this year that I decided to actually run for office myself.
LFP: Would it be accurate to say that your primary concern in terms of deciding to run for the City Council was inadequate infrastructure, in terms of roads?
Harrison: Yes, I think infrastructure and the high-density development, which brings in, obviously, a lot of people in a very concentrated area. It’s a mix of infrastructure being adequate, along with whether we can handle the influx of population.
LFP: Those are all essentially infrastructure questions.
Harrison: Yes, it is. It’s kind of tied together. I mean, we talked in the campaign a lot about police resources and headcount for the police, which I think everybody agrees is understaffed, but that’s again related to high density, right? Because a lot of police calls are out to the Exchange and other parts of Lehi, where there is high density. And it doesn’t mean that just because it’s high density, that doesn’t equal crime necessarily. It’s just that you have a lot of people packed into a smaller area, and over time, the homes become rentals, and it’s much more transient in nature. And so, people aren’t as involved in their communities as if they were setting down roots and staying.
LFP: Yes, high-density areas tend to require more policing. That’s not just a Lehi thing. If we agree, which we probably do, that Lehi is somewhat understaffed from a policing standpoint, I would argue that the Lehi police force does remarkably well. Our crime rate in Lehi for petty crimes and theft, essentially minor crimes, is remarkably low compared to like-sized cities. I was talking to Mark Johnson recently about this topic, and he said, Yeah, I would love to have more police officers, but we were talking about the price tag of hiring is not cheap, around $150,000 to $200,000 including benefits, training and equipment.
Harrison: Yes. The most recent figure I saw when I met with Chief Paul was about $160 to $170 thousand per officer, but you have ongoing costs, right? You have upgraded equipment, so over time, it’s expensive.
LFP: Even just the increasing cost of benefits and keeping up with the benefits offered by competing agencies is tough. So, it’s not cheap, and there’s always competition for money. I think it’s easy to say we need more cops, but finding the money is the challenge.
Harrison: That’s where elections come into play, as far as priorities on the budget, and I think for the city council, that’s one of our biggest responsibilities–to look at the budget, to prioritize certain things. At this point, we can’t solve this overnight or even in one year’s budget, but over the course of four or five years, we can get to a point where we have two or three more police officers per year than we normally would have.
We’ll have to reprioritize the budget, but we’ll get to the point where we’ll be able to meet the demands of the growing population.
And I think that a very rough kind of national estimate is about one police officer per 1000 residents, and if you look at just that alone, we’re about 30 understaffed, but we are very safe.
LFP: Yes, this is not Detroit.
Harrison: Right, this isn’t Detroit. I like to look at Orem as a good comparison, because we’re about the same in population, but Lehi and Orem are very different in terms of density and the character of the town. I don’t think right now it’s a five alarm fire, like crime is going out of control in Lehi, but the job of the Council is to look forward 5-10-15 years so we don’t get to a point where suddenly crime has spiked, but we don’t have resources to handle it, and then people begin to look elsewhere to live because of the problem. My goal is to be more strategic in how we approach that with a longer-term view.
LFP: Well, Lehi started out as a sleepy farming community, which is how it was when I grew up here. And obviously that’s not what Lehi is anymore, but we still have those LDS pioneer underpinnings and ethics, and this is generally a safe community. Especially, pockets of it are very friendly and safe. But big city crime is obviously happening here. I mean, we see the SVU unit of the police department, they’re very busy.
Harrison: Yes, they’re very good at their job, and we’re very proud of both our fire department and the police department, Chief Paul and Chief Craft, both getting very prestigious awards this year in the same city. I just want to make sure they have the resources they need. Because, for me, I think it goes down to how you view government. Is the government there to provide perks and fun things? I think sometimes we can, but I think the fundamental responsibility of government is to provide safety, especially on a city level, right? If we fail to do that, then fixing or building parks really doesn’t matter if our crime rates go up because we don’t have the resources we need.
This is probably the one issue that unifies all of the current council, future councils, and the mayors, which is, I think, prioritizing public safety before it becomes a problem.
LFP: As a council member, you are part of the law-making body for the city. What is your mandate going into the city council that may have been missing with the prior council? What is the role you play in the new council?
Harrison: If you look at the recent election, I think it was very unusual. With Paige [Albrecht] resigning, the most tenured elected officials are Michelle [Stallings] and Heather [Newall], with two years under their belt. I think the election showed that people are very frustrated with the pace of development. Nobody that I’ve met with, including myself, is anti-growth. We’re not trying to wind the clock back. I think what I bring is a perspective of a regular resident who has observed how the city has grown and some of the pain points and how do we how do we address that?
The most frustrating part for me is that the state government and developers are extremely powerful. The state is pushing down these mandates [on municipalities]. The governor is talking about taking zoning authority away from cities to zone how they see fit, which I think is absolutely reckless, and it’s the least conservative way to govern. If you’re trying to solve housing affordability, I think you’re chasing something you’ll never catch. The economy is much bigger and more complex than anything the government can solve with more and more housing.
You think about the massive new developments in Lehi. Are we building those for Lehi residents? We’re not. We’re building them for people who don’t live in Lehi currently, and, in fact, probably don’t even live in the state of Utah currently.
As we build more and more housing, we have to think 10 years down the road– how does this look? You see other parts of Salt Lake Valley and Weber County where you have new development or high density. Ten – 15 years down the road, it’s not as nice as it was when it was built. To say it nicely.
LFP: So, what would you suggest doing to address that?
Harrison: My goal is to push back on the state within the bounds of the law, using the city’s lobbyists, our state representatives and our public relations staff to push back. I think we’re getting to the point, not just in Lehi, but as a state and other communities, where there’s going to be more pushback on what the state is doing. When roughly a third of the state lawmakers are in [real estate] development and have personally profited from these state laws and mandates, that’s troubling. I’m a conservative. I believe in limited government. Utah is the most liberal red state in the country, or the highest taxed red state in the country, and to me, it’s not about red versus blue; it’s about good policy.
I don’t think we understand the ramifications of how fast we are growing. And it’s not all about just bringing giant companies into the state and increasing our population as fast as we can. I think we have to think about the quality of life. We have to think about whether we continue down this route 10-20 years from now, it’s not going to be about, can my child afford a house in Lehi or in Utah? It’s going to be, do I even want to be a part of this culture anymore? Because it’s changed so fast and dramatically.
LFP: There are some people who already feel their quality of life, based on the development and the growth, has diminished. That’s not something that might happen in 10 years. That’s something that many people currently believe.
Harrison: I believe it. And you see a lot of people looking outside of the Wasatch Front who have lived here their whole lives. They look at Heber, but Heber is exploding in price. So, they’re looking at central and southern Utah and are trying to find an area where they can raise their kids in something familiar. Lehi is a good example. Everything is changing so fast that sometimes it’s unrecognizable.
I don’t have friends in real estate development. I don’t have any other motivation except to make sure that the Lehi government is efficient and effective, that it does exactly what it should and nothing more, and that our quality of life is protected.
Lehi is unique. Of all the cities I’ve visited, including where I grew up, Lehi is unique because we still have a unique identity. It’s like a rural town, but we’re not rural anymore. I mean, there are pockets that are, but we still kind of feel that way. That’s unusual for a city this size and this populated. How do we maintain that character and protect those unique things, like the Hutchings Museum? I visited there the other day, and it was so impressive and cool. And the rodeo. I think that’s very unique. And I like maintaining that, because I think over time, we risk forgetting our identity, or losing it as the city grows and grows.
LFP: Do you see yourself living in Lehi for many years? Do you plan to finish raising your family here? The federal government could approach you to take a position with the State Department again. What do you think the likelihood of that is?
Harrison: I don’t really have any aspirations for anything else. The State Department doesn’t really operate like that, as far as calling people back.
LFP: So, see yourself being a Lehi resident for a long time?
Harrison: Once we returned from overseas, we thought Lehi was where we wanted to settle. We don’t have any plans to move, and I’ve already said I don’t want to serve more than two terms. I think that’s plenty of time.
LFP: Do you have any political aspirations beyond city council at this point?
Harrison: At this point, no, I’m just a problem solver. Sometimes it annoys my wife a little bit. Maybe she just wants me to listen rather than try to solve problems. I just want to make a difference. And then, after a term or two, I think it would be good to just hand it over to the next person who could contribute. We’re here for good, and I think Lehi is an amazing place to raise a family.
