Craig Frank to return to House seat he was ousted from a year ago

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Delegates in House District 57 voted Wednesday to return former state Rep. Craig Frank to the House seat he was ousted from a year ago when it was discovered he lived outside of the district boundaries.

Holly Richardson was chosen to replace Frank last year, but resigned this month to work on the U.S. Senate campaign of former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist.

Lawmakers redrew the District 57 boundaries at the end of last session to correct a clerical error and include the Cedar Hills neighborhood where the Frank family lived. He has since moved back to a home the family owned in Pleasant Grove, which is inside the district.

Frank, who served in the state House for nearly eight years, won 69 percent of the vote, beating Jeremy Washburn, who is the son of the late Orem mayor, and Deanne Taylor, a businesswoman and community activist. Gov. Gary Herbert must formally appoint Frank to fill the seat.

Frank, who served in the state House for nearly eight years, will represent the Pleasant Grove and Cedar Hills district for just a year and be ineligible to run for re-election, since he won't have lived in the newly redrawn district for six months before the March 15 filing deadline.

At that point, Frank has said, he will run for the state Senate against incumbent Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, who sponsored the bill to revise District 57 boundaries to include Cedar Hills.

Frank discovered shortly before the 2011 session that, due to a clerical error, his Cedar Hills home was not inside the District 57 boundaries. The map prepared by the county clerk showed his home within the district, but the official maps passed by the Legislature showed it was not. Utah's Constitution requires that lawmakers live in the districts they represent.

Craig fought for weeks to keep his seat, even threatening legal action. But as the session approached, House leaders made clear they would not seat him and he opted to resign.

For a time, Frank floated the prospect that he might run for governor or Congress, but decided against those bids.