Records appeal outcomes
Utah records appeal decisions going back to 1992, gathered and counted. How often the person asking for records actually got them, year by year, and what changed when a single director replaced the seven-member committee.
Year by year
Granted Granted in part Denied circle size = decisions on the merits · fill is by area, not height
How this was counted
Where the data comes from
This is a row-level count of the decisions and orders the two bodies issued, not a sample. Appeals closed without a written order, withdrawn, ruled incomplete, or refused a hearing, are not decisions and are not counted.
Two of the office decisions counted here, appeals 2025-117 and 2025-118, carry a decision date of 20 January 2025 on the state’s own index, which is six months before the office began hearing appeals. They are counted as the state publishes them. Anyone recounting from the index will find the same two.
State Records Committee decisions, 1992 to April 2025
Government Records Office decisions, July 2025 onward
What counts as a decision, and what counts as a win
A decision counts if it reached the merits, meaning the outcome was denied, granted, or partially granted. Continuances, dismissals, mootness findings and scheduling orders are left out, because none of them decides whether the records come out. The tables above show the merits count alongside the full disposition count for each period, so the difference is visible rather than asserted.
A partial grant counts as a win, because the person got records they had been refused. Counting partials as losses would put the committee at 24% and the office at 12%, and the gap between them would be about the same.
How to check any single year
Open the committee table above. Case numbers begin with the year, so every 2018 decision starts with 18. Count the ones whose Ruling column reads Appeal Granted or Appeal Partially Granted, then divide by those plus the ones reading Appeal Denied. That is the percentage in the last column here. It takes about a minute.
The office table works the same way but carries its own Date column. Use the appeal number rather than the date if you are matching against the figures here, because the office has been deciding appeals filed in earlier years.
What these numbers cannot tell you
The committee has 34 years of decisions behind it and the office has far fewer, so there is more to go on for one than the other. The office also began by clearing a stack of appeals it inherited, which means its early cases were not a normal mix, and the ones that had waited longest may have been the harder ones. The committee spent months in 2024 and 2025 without enough members to do its work, which held down how much it could decide. And the outcome labels here are the ones the Archives publishes. Where a decision released some records and withheld others, that table’s own label governs.
The 2022 figure, 22%, is the lowest of the committee’s modern years and is not an error. That year it denied 39 of the 50 appeals it decided on the merits.
Records disputes in court
Each row below is one records dispute that reached a court. The bar shows where the dispute went, from the records office to the courts, with each segment drawn to the time it spent there. The words under the bar give the same path in days. The switch above the bars shows either how long each stage took, with every dispute starting at the left, or when it happened on the calendar.
There are three ways into court. A requester whose request is denied can appeal to the Government Records Office, appeal to a local appeals board where the city or county has one, or petition the district court directly (Section 63G-2-402). A decision of the office or of a local board can be taken to district court within 30 days (Sections 63G-2-403, 63G-2-404 and 63G-2-701). The court decides the dispute over again, de novo, rather than reviewing the earlier decision for error.
No dispute matches that combination.
Hatched years have not been searched yet. Know of an additional case? Send it in.
Court dockets and the office’s hearing records, case by case; new cases are drawn in as they are found. Filings are in the tracker
About this data
What each row is
Selecting a row opens its card, with the dates for each stage and the case numbers, which link to the case page where one exists.
Where the dates come from
Every date drawn here is read from a court filing, a published decision, or the office’s own appeal log. A date that cannot be traced to one of those sources is not drawn, so some rows show only their records-office bar until the court file confirms the rest. A segment that fades runs to the date of the most recent official record showing the matter still pending, not to the present day. Each row’s card carries the note recorded against each date and, where one is on file, a link to what backs it.
Checking the work
The rows behind this figure, with the source recorded for every date, are in the public data spreadsheet, alongside the standards that decide what is drawn and a log of corrections. Anything that looks wrong can be sent to [email protected].
Reporters and legal professionals may use the data and visualizations on this page at no cost. Print them, post them, drop them into a story, with or without credit. Want the numbers or coding behind them? Write in.