by Alex Thompson
Disclosure: The author is a legal professional who works on First Amendment and public records matters in Utah and has worked with the respondents in the petition described here. This article is published with their permission.
The room was the usual one. A Tuesday morning in the Utah Capitol, the last day of January 2022, the House Government Operations Committee working through a bill almost nobody outside the building was following.
House Bill 96 was a fee bill. Under Utah's records law, an agency waives the cost of the first fifteen minutes of work on a public records request. Rep. Dan Johnson, a Logan Republican, wanted to take that waiver away from anyone who had filed another request in the previous ten days. Ask twice in a week and a half, and the meter starts running from the first minute.
Jess Bradfield, the Cache County clerk and auditor, testified in support on behalf of the state's county clerks and the Utah Association of Counties. The problem, as he described it, was people who had figured out the system. "Vexatious and serial requesters have learned that they're allowed to submit an unlimited number of small requests each day to an entity," he told the committee.
Then Renae Cowley Laub stood up. She lobbies for the Utah Media Coalition, which is to say she was there for the newspapers, the television stations, everyone in the state whose job depends on being able to ask the government for things.
She opposed the bill. A blanket fee, she argued, punishes everyone to reach a few. And then, trying to be helpful, she offered the committee an alternative. Other states, she explained, do it differently. They make the government come forward and prove its case before it can label someone a vexatious requester. It is narrower. It has a process. And she added a caution, which reads differently now than it must have sounded then: a designation like that could be used against a news organization.
Rep. Norm Thurston, a Provo Republican, had been listening.
"I'm intrigued because I would love to label the Salt Lake Tribune as a vexatious requester," Thurston said, according to KSL's account of the hearing that day. "So I think if you want to go down that path, let us know because we may have a substitute bill coming."
A few minutes later, Thurston moved that the committee send HB 96 forward with a favorable recommendation. The vote was 10 to 1.
The one
The no vote came from Rep. Phil Lyman, a Republican from Blanding, about as far from the Capitol as you can get and still be in Utah.
Lyman had spent the hearing sounding genuinely undecided. He said he could see both sides. He said he wasn't sure whether the bill was "an accommodation or if it's a reaction to people who need information and are requesting information." He allowed that Cache County seemed to run a clean operation. But he had seen others. "Some counties, they drag their feet, they put people through the wringer."
When it came time to vote, he explained himself.
"When you put in a new fee like this, it sends a strong message that, you know, the government is in charge of this and they're not going to be controlled by the people," Lyman said. "And I think the people want to send a strong message to the government that the people are in charge of it, they're not going to be controlled by the government."
"I think this is a move in the wrong direction, myself, so I'm gonna vote no on it."
HB 96 passed the House, cleared the Senate, and was signed by the governor on March 22, 2022. Johnson told colleagues the bill wasn't about labeling anyone. By then the phrase had gotten loose anyway.
The bill nobody was watching
A year later, the idea Cowley Laub had floated as the safer option showed up as an actual bill.
Senate Bill 231 of the 2023 session ran to dozens of pages of amendments to the Government Records Access and Management Act. Buried in the section listing which parts of the code it touched was a single line under the heading ENACTS: 63G-2-209.
That is the vexatious requester provision. A government agency files a petition. If it wins, it owes that person nothing at all for as long as a year.
Read the statute closely and the design becomes clear. The remedy runs against a person, not against a request. The documents themselves never get argued about. Someone declared vexatious has not lost a fight over whether particular records are public. They have lost the ability to ask the question.
The sponsor was Sen. Curt Bramble.
The man who wrote both laws
Bramble was, by 2023, the longest-serving state senator in Utah, a Provo accountant who had been in the building since 2001 and who ran committees the way people run things when they have been somewhere twenty-two years. He was not an enemy of open records. In 2012, GRAMA Watch gave him its Shining Light award for a bill that improved the very statute he would later amend, an honor he was still citing when he announced his retirement.
He is also the author of SB 54.
That is the 2014 law, born of the fight between the Count My Vote initiative and the Utah Republican Party, that created Utah's second path to the primary ballot. Gather enough voter signatures and a candidate qualifies regardless of what the convention delegates want. Every signature packet, every paid circulator, every candidate who bought their way past a convention they would have lost, traces back to that bill.
So the same legislator wrote the law that made signature gathering the road to power, and the law that lets an agency stop answering questions about it.
SB 231 was more specific than that framing suggests. Its own summary says the bill "authorizes the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the governor and lieutenant governor to establish a process for obtaining relief against a vexatious requester," and that it "amends the act's applicability to the governor and lieutenant governor." The offices that would use the tool were written into the bill that created it.
The House floor sponsor was Rep. Anthony Loubet. Gov. Spencer Cox signed it on March 23, 2023. It took effect that May.
The House passed it 66 to 4. Phil Lyman voted no.
Bramble was not finished with the records act. During the 2024 session, after a judge ordered Attorney General Sean Reyes to hand his work calendar over to KSL, Bramble sponsored a bill understood to keep elected officials' schedules out of reach going forward. He retired on the last day of 2024, after twenty-four years.
The committee disappears
When SB 231 passed, these petitions went before the State Records Committee: seven members, appointed by the governor with Senate consent, including two citizens, a records manager from the private sector, and, by statute, a representative of the news media.
That body no longer exists.
Senate Bill 277, sponsored in 2025 by Sen. Michael McKell with Rep. Jefferson Moss carrying it in the House, "repeals the committee" and stands up the Government Records Office in its place. The bill "requires the governor to appoint the director of the office," and the director "will replace the committee in fulfilling the duties currently assigned to the committee, including the duty to decide appeals." Cox signed it on March 27, 2025.
Seven people, one of whom had to be from the press, became one appointee of the governor.
June
On June 16, 2026, the Office of the Lieutenant Governor filed a petition asking that office to declare four Utahns vexatious requesters and bar them from asking again for records about candidate nomination petitions from the 2024 election.
By the office's own count, the four had submitted fifty-five requests. Forty-two concerned signature packets. The Lieutenant Governor is Utah's chief election officer, and her office is the one that verifies those packets, including the ones submitted on behalf of the ticket she and the governor ran on in 2024.
On June 29, the director issued an initial determination denying the petition. The statute, he wrote, requires a showing against each individual. It does not permit four people to be treated as one because the office believes they are working together.
One of the four is Phil Lyman.
Three years before that petition was filed, Lyman had stood in a committee room and warned that making records harder to get sends the message that government, rather than the public, is in charge. He was outvoted ten to one. When the bill creating the vexatious requester power came through the following year, he voted against that too, one of four no votes in a chamber of seventy-five. He lost again.
Nothing in the record suggests the state moved against him because of those votes, and it would be dishonest to imply it did. What the record shows is that the man now fighting to keep his right to ask for public records is one of the few people in Utah government who tried to keep that power from existing.
The part nobody has used yet
There is one more thing in the statute, and it has gone untouched.
If an agency files one of these petitions and it lacks a reasonable basis in fact or law, a court may order the agency to pay the respondent's attorney fees. Governmental immunity is waived for that claim. The Legislature built a cost into filing a bad petition.
In the three years the provision has been on the books, no one appears to have collected it.
Seven petitions have produced a public record. Six have been decided. Six of the seven targeted a single individual, and not one of the decided cases had anything to do with elections. What those six agencies had to prove, and what the one that lost failed to show, will be the subject of the next post.