Director denies Young’s broad GRAMA request against West Jordan City for lack of specificity

The director denied Appeal No. 2026‑126, brought by Mister Young against West Jordan City, finding the records request too broad to require a reasonable, city‑wide search.

Young sought records identifying city attorneys who appeared in a set of cases, expenditures and overtime tied to those prosecutions, and communications between city employees and certain named attorneys. City counsel (Mister Dodd) told the director that many responsive documents are publicly available through court exchange and that the city does not index expenditures or overtime by case number, making the request unreasonably burdensome.

Dodd explained searches the city did perform (including consultation with a records clerk and review of expenditures for specified names) and noted the city’s data‑recovery issues after a past data breach that make very old records harder to locate. The director said the request lacked the required specificity under GRAMA and denied the appeal, noting the petitioner could file narrower, targeted requests.

Why it matters: GRAMA requires reasonable specificity so public bodies can locate responsive records; the ruling illustrates the administrative threshold for broad, case‑indexed searches.