John R. Curtis

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize and honor Natalie Kaddas and Kaddas Enterprises on this 60th anniversary celebration.

Natalie Kaddas, the company's second-generation owner and chief executive officer. When John and Carol Kaddas were ready to retire, they turned the company over to their son Jay and his wife Natalie. Natalie's own story is a distinctly Utah one. She attended Salt Lake Community College's Travel and Tourism program, stepped away to raise a family, and returned to the classroom again and again over the years, training in employment law, accounting, sales, and electrical technology as the business demanded new skills of her. In 2019, SLCC recognized her with its Distinguished Alumni Award. She is also a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, and Utah Business named her one of its 30 Women to Watch in 2025.

Under Natalie's leadership, Kaddas Enterprises has grown from a regional manufacturer into a company whose products protect wildlife and power infrastructure on multiple continents. She has taken her father-in-law's original mission--protecting raptors from electrocution--and expanded it dramatically. Just this year, Kaddas Enterprises and the Kenya Power and Lighting Company launched a 5-year partnership to bring the BirdguarD line to East Africa, a region where wildlife contact with power infrastructure causes roughly 30 percent of outages. The agreement will help protect species such as the Augur Buzzard and Martial Eagle in habitats like the Soysambu Conservancy, while reducing the animal-caused electrical faults that can spark wildfires and endanger nearby communities and critical energy systems. It is Utah innovation, quite literally, saving raptors, protecting the grid, and preventing wildfires around the world.

Natalie's leadership extends well beyond her own company. She serves as chair of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Small Business Council, sits on the Chamber's board of directors and executive committee as the West Region's vice chair, and serves on the Utah District Export Council and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Voices National Leadership Council. In every one of these roles, she carries Utah's small business perspective to a national stage.

Sixty years ago, John and Carol Kaddas built a company in their kitchen. Today, under Natalie Kaddas' leadership, that company protects eagles in Utah, buzzards in Kenya, employs dozens of Utahns, and stands as a model of what a family business can become.

I ask that my colleagues join me in congratulating Natalie Kaddas and the Kaddas Enterprises team on 60 remarkable years; may their work continue to benefit future generations of Utahns and have lasting impact on here and abroad.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, tomorrow, Utahns will celebrate Pioneer Day, which commemorates the arrival of the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.

For many outside Utah, Pioneer Day may seem a little unique and a strange local observance, but the values it commemorates are profoundly American and can resonate with all of us. We recognize not only a historic journey but the enduring pioneer spirit that helped shape the American West and continues to shape our country today.

The early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought to actualize our first freedom and something every American should cherish: religious liberty. Instead, they were driven from their homes, stripped of their property, and forced to flee into an uncertain wilderness. Thousands traveled more than 1,300 miles across plains, deserts, and mountains.

I recently walked 250 miles in remembrance of that journey, and it is true that it challenged me, but I had every modern advantage, including seven pairs of shoes, a support team, and an RV to sleep in. Their sacrifice was of an entirely different magnitude: parents buried children, children buried parents, spouses buried their soulmates. Yet they sang a song that will be sung in many church buildings across Utah on Sunday: ``Come, Come, Ye Saints.'' In that song, they sing ``All is well,'' for they had a vision of a land, as the song goes, ``far away in the West, where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; there the Saints will be blessed.''

When they finally reached that place, the Salt Lake Valley, they didn't dwell on all they had lost; they focused on what they could build. Within days, they were planting crops, digging irrigation canals, laying out streets, and creating communities where none had existed before. Over the decades that followed, they established hundreds of settlements across the Mountain West, built roads and bridges, and helped countless other immigrants travel west.

That is the pioneer spirit. That is the American spirit. It is resilience in the face of hardship. It is self-reliance married with cooperation. It is choosing to build instead of surrender.

As our Nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, I believe those values are as relevant today as they were nearly 180 years ago. Every generation faces its own frontier. Ours may not be crossing the plains, but we are still called to solve difficult problems, to contribute meaningfully to our communities, and to leave a better nation for those who inherit it.

Americans still want to build something meaningful. They still want to provide for their families. They still want their children to inherit greater opportunities than they themselves received. Those aspirations haven't changed. What has changed is that sometimes we forget the virtues and the sacrifices that are required to achieve them.

May we all this Pioneer Day recommit ourselves to remembering that heritage and channeling that spirit in our own hearts because the American story has never belonged to just one generation. It is written by each generation willing to work, sacrifice, and build for the next.

That is why the resolution I am introducing with my colleagues today is about more than honoring the past. It is about carrying forward the virtues that made those pioneers successful: faith, sacrifice, community, industry, and perseverance. May we honor their legacy by living those same values and by continuing to move our Nation forward one faithful step at a time.