Three years of vexatious requester petitions, and what they actually show
Utah agencies have petitioned to cut off a citizen's records requests seven times. Six have been decided. The record is smaller and stranger than the statute suggests.
Since May 2023, a Utah government agency has been able to ask the state to declare a person a vexatious requester and be relieved of any duty to answer that person’s records requests for as long as a year.
We went looking for how often it had happened. No list existed, so we built one from the published orders of the State Records Committee and the Government Records Office.
Seven petitions have produced a public order or determination. Six have been decided. That is the entire body of law.
Two men account for most of it
Brady Eames has been the respondent in three of the six decided matters: one brought by the State Treasurer’s Office in 2023 and two by Logan City, in 2024 and again in 2025 after the first order lapsed. Ian Cooperstein, Kevin Sullivan, and Mark Allen account for the rest.
So a provision written in general terms has been used almost entirely against a handful of unusually prolific individual requesters. That matters for reading the cases: the decided record describes an extreme, and the statute reaches much further than the extreme.
Volume is not the test, in either direction
The most common assumption about this provision is that it turns on how many requests you file. The record says otherwise, twice over.
Tooele City won an order against Kevin Sullivan on 21 requests. The Committee said outright that 21 was not sufficient on volume and rested the finding on his communications, which included a reported threat of violence.
The University of Utah lost against Ian Cooperstein on more than 200. Most of those requests predated the statute’s May 3, 2023 effective date and could not be weighed retroactively, and the University acknowledged he had filed nothing new in the preceding nine months.
Request count is the first factor the statute lists. It has not been decisive in either direction.
What has actually carried a petition
The agencies that won did not rely on characterization. They documented burden in numbers, and they compared.
Utah County supported its petition against Mark Allen with more than 500 pages of exhibits and an average processing time of 28 days per request against 7.1 days for every other requester. Logan City’s recorder estimated more than 500 requests since 2016, with over 100 in a single year, and staff testified that entire shifts went to processing them. The Treasurer’s Office set 43 requests in one year against 8 from the office’s next most frequent requester.
Each of those is a ratio, not a raw count. That is what the statutory language about substantial interference with operations actually asks for.
The decisionmaker has consistently given less than asked
Relief is capped at one year. In the granted cases it has run seven months, six months, and twelve months twice.
The Allen decision is the most useful passage in the entire body of law for anyone defending one of these. Having found the conduct vexatious on a record of 435 requests, the Director cut the county’s requested twelve months to six, citing that Allen had also sought records for matters of legitimate public interest, that some of his efforts had substantially benefitted the public as shown by letters of support from outside organizations, that he participated in good faith, and that no petition had ever been filed against him before.
The Treasurer’s Office asked for twelve months and got seven.
The costliest thing a respondent can do is nothing
Sullivan neither submitted a written statement nor attended his hearing. The Committee noted it had no choice but to accept the city’s evidence at face value.
Nothing in Section 209 delays a decision because a respondent stays silent. If you file nothing and do not appear, the director either cancels the hearing or holds it without you, and the decision clock still runs from the date the hearing was set for.
The deadline that matters runs backward: a written statement is due no later than five business days before the hearing, and a hearing can be set as soon as sixteen calendar days after the petition is filed.
The provision has never cost an agency anything
Section 209 lets a court award a respondent attorney fees, and waives governmental immunity for that claim. But the test is conjunctive and brutal: the respondent must substantially prevail, and the court must find the petition was without merit, that it lacked a reasonable basis in fact or law, and that the agency filed it in bad faith. All three.
No published decision reflects such an award. In three years, filing one of these has been free.
Every petition, with its documents and disposition, is in the tracker. The process, with its deadlines, is here. What an agency has to prove is here.