Meet Suzanne Harrison
Suzanne Harrison has devoted her life to serving her family and her community.
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For the last four years, Suzanne has represented Sandy and Draper in the state legislature and earned a reputation for putting progress and fiscal responsibility above politics and partisanship. A Democrat, she was elected twice in a district that historically elected Republicans by a 30-point margin.
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Suzanne has been one of the legislature's strongest leaders on air quality, co-chairing the legislature's clean air caucus for four years. Suzanne has helped lead the charge for Tier 3 gas in Utah, even personally launching a website to help Utahns find where they can find this cleaner-burning fuel close to home.
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She led the effort to expand Medicaid coverage of diabetes, helped reduce the cost of Epi-pens in Utah, and identified more than $40 million in wasteful Utah Medicaid spending.
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Suzanne has also been a fierce fiscal watchdog, leading the charge against a 2019 plan by legislative leaders to raise the food tax on Utahns. After it became law, she worked on a citizen referendum to repeal it, collecting signatures and campaigning exhaustively until the Legislature finally repealed the tax increase.
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Suzanne is often one of the first elected leaders to stand up to the governor and legislative leaders when taxpayer dollars were being misspent. At the start of the pandemic, when Utah's leaders awarded no-bid contracts to tech companies with no health experience, Suzanne was among the first to demand answers. She flagged that the state government wasn't conducting proper oversight of TestUtah and she warned that Utah taxpayers were footing the bill for the state's COVID tests instead of those costs being billed to insurance companies — keeping $10 million from going to support small businesses and workers hurt by the pandemic.
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Suzanne is also a board-certified medical doctor at Riverton Hospital, making life-and-death decisions every day based on science and data to keep her patients safe. She has previously chaired the hospital’s anesthesiology department and served as president of the Salt Lake County Medical Society. She earned her medical degree at the University of Utah and completed her residency in anesthesiology and critical care at Harvard University.
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Suzanne grew up in Provo, where her parents both spent their careers working at BYU. She went to Timpview High School before attending Stanford University, where she met her husband, John, who was raised in Centerville, Utah. John now works as the vice president of engineering at Lucid Software. Today they are raising their three wonderful children in Draper, volunteering in their schools and community.