Guides
General information about Utah law. Not legal advice.
What an agency has to prove
What the record shows about when a petition succeeds, and what evidence has carried one.
The law lists things the decisionmaker is supposed to look at, but a specific threshold remains elusive. The decided cases fill some of that in. Everything below comes from published orders, and it should be equally useful to an agency deciding whether to file one of these and to a person deciding how to answer one.
Is the number of requests enough on its own?
No. Tooele City won its petition against a man who had filed 21 requests, and the committee said plainly that 21 was not enough by itself. What carried the case was his threatening messages. The University of Utah lost on more than 200 requests. The number is the first thing the law says to look at. It is not the thing that decides it.
Do requests made before the law passed count?
No. Section 209 took effect May 3, 2023. In the Cooperstein case most of the requests came before that date, and the committee held they could not be counted against him. That by itself sank the petition.
Is it enough for an agency to say the requester was hostile?
Not without something to back it up. In the Treasurer's case the committee granted the petition but refused to rely on the agency's account of hostile messages, because that account was unsupported except for the agency's say-so. In Tooele, messages the city could document carried a petition that the request count could not.
Can an agency go after several people at once?
It can file one petition, but it has to prove its case against each person separately. The Lieutenant Governor's Office asked that four requesters be treated as a single vexatious actor, on the theory that they were working together. The director held that Section 209 speaks about one person throughout, and requires a separate showing, tied to that person's own conduct, for each one named.
Does it matter why the requests were made?
Yes, and it can defeat the petition. The law tells the decisionmaker to weigh what the requests were about, how they were written, and what they covered. In the Clara matter the director found the requests served a public purpose, shown by the audits and the changes in law they led to, and so could not be treated as an abuse of the right to ask.
§ 63G-2-209(9)If the petition succeeds, can anything shorten it?
Yes. Several things have. Utah County asked for the full year against a man who had filed 435 requests. The director granted six months, pointing to the public value of some of the requests, his good-faith participation in the process, letters of support from outside groups, and the fact that no earlier petition against him appears in the published decisions. The same reasoning cut the Treasurer's request from twelve months to seven.
What happens if the person does not answer?
The agency's version stands unchallenged. One man neither filed a written statement nor came to his hearing. The committee said it had no choice but to take the agency's evidence as true. The law does not slow a decision simply because the person on the other side stays silent.
What has actually persuaded a decisionmaker?
Documents and numbers, not adjectives. The agencies that won did not simply describe the problem. They filed sworn statements from the people doing the work, usually a city recorder or a department head, and put the burden in figures.
Utah County backed its petition with more than 500 pages of exhibits and showed that this requester's filings took an average of 28 days to process, against 7.1 days for everyone else. Logan City's recorder counted more than 500 requests since 2016, over 100 in a single year, and staff testified that entire shifts went to handling them. The Treasurer's Office set 43 requests in one year against 8 from the next most frequent requester.
Each of those is a comparison rather than a raw count. That is what the law is asking for when it talks about interfering substantially with an agency's work.
How long do these orders last?
Six months to a year, and usually less than the agency asked for. One year is the maximum. Orders so far have run from six to twelve months, and the decisionmaker has repeatedly granted less than the agency wanted. An order granting a petition has to give its reasons, say exactly what conduct it found vexatious, and tell the person they can ask a court to review it.
§ 63G-2-209(8)