Director denies request to force DPS to produce statewide machine-readable registry export

The Government Records Office director denied an appeal seeking a machine-readable statewide export of public fields from the Department of Public Safety’s offender registry, concluding that producing the dataset in the requested form would require compiling and formatting beyond GRAMA’s requirements.

Courtney Johns, representing herself, asked the office to order DPS to release registry data in CSV or Excel limited to fields that Utah law makes public, arguing that the website’s limited interface (search radius or per-query restrictions) prevents statewide analysis. Johns asked, alternatively, for an in-camera review or a remand requiring a field-by-field index with subsection-level citations for withheld fields.

DPS counsel (Mister Jorgensen) said the registry is publicly accessible through a searchable website and that many fields the requester sought are private; he said producing a tailored export would require creating or manipulating the database output. "The government entity is not required to respond to a request if the data is already publicly available on the website," counsel said, and warned that bulk disclosure could enable harassment and misuse the statute seeks to prevent.

The director acknowledged both positions: that the statute requires certain fields to be on the public website and that some data are private, but concluded on the record that producing the exact export Johns requested would require compiling and formatting the data in a way GRAMA does not compel. The director therefore denied the appeal, encouraged continued cooperative work between the parties, and said a written decision will follow within seven business days with a 30-calendar-day right to appeal to district court.

The ruling leaves open narrower compliance steps: the director said that if DPS can demonstrate an existing export function limited to public fields, the outcome might differ, but the present testimony described a system that could export only in blocks and would require further manual redaction and manipulation to remove private fields.