Utah taxpayers have lobbed questions at Vineyard’s redevelopment agency for months about its oversight of public funds. The city finally provided some answers last week in a memo, which was at least partly written using artificial intelligence, cites Utah court decisions that seemingly don’t exist and is causing more confusion than clarity.
Vineyard created the redevelopment agency, or RDA, in 2007 to clean up the old Geneva Steel site, attract more residents and encourage development of Utah City, its future downtown core, on about 2,000 acres near the shores of Utah Lake. The RDA accumulates revenue from property taxes that would have otherwise gone to public entities like Alpine School District and Utah County. It expects to collect nearly $12.7 million in taxes this year.
State law requires urban renewal and community development projects to give the impacted taxing entities some oversight in how they proceed. The Vineyard RDA opted to create a taxing entity committee that would weigh in on the project plan and budget, then meet annually to “stay abreast of the status” of the RDA for as long as it received property taxes, according to a resolution approved in 2009.
That committee included two seats appointed by the Alpine School District, two appointed by the county, two appointed by the Vineyard Town Council (now City Council), one appointed by the state board of education and one representing all the rest of the taxing entities, like water and service districts.
But while the committee members were supposed to meet each year to keep tabs on Vineyard’s project, they haven’t convened since 2011, city officials confirmed.
That means “any tax increment financing given, whether to cleanup or incentivize developers, could be clawed back,” said John Barrick, a professor of accounting who lives in Utah County and has researched the legality of Vineyard’s RDA.
The last time the taxing entity committee met, Vineyard had a population of 133. It has since exploded to more than 14,500 residents, largely thanks to RDA investment.
The RDA board includes Vineyard’s five City Council members, including Mayor Julie Fullmer, but the committee stopped meeting long before the current members took office.
The city’s RDA director, former Utah County Clerk Josh Daniels, issued a memo June 4 addressing concerns sleuths have raised after investigating the agency’s history. Daniels also shared his document with the City Council.
The memo states the taxing entity committee does not need to meet annually because the resolution members agreed to back in 2009 went above and beyond state law.
Daniels cited four cases from the Utah Supreme Court and Utah Court of Appeals to argue in the RDA’s defense. But two of the cases analyzed in his memo do not appear to exist. The two others do not include citations the memo claims their rulings contain.
John Gadd, an attorney based in Pleasant Grove, said he suspects Daniels used an artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to generate the memo and that it created “hallucinations,” inaccurate information the AI invented. Or, he said, Daniels could have fabricated the cases on his own.
“Either way,” Gadd said, “… he should have known better than to send the entire Vineyard City Council a legal memo with case quotes that don’t exist.”
In an interview, Daniels said he used AI to summarize past actions taken by the taxing entity committee in his memo, but not to write his legal summary.
The RDA director studied law at the University of Houston, according to his LinkedIn profile and previous county clerk campaign website. He said he has not joined any bar and he does not appear to be licensed to practice law in Utah.
Gadd said sloppy use of AI in court research is on the rise. “It’s a known problem within the legal community,” he said.
Last month, the Utah Court of Appeals penalized an attorney for using AI to file a brief citing a hallucinated precedent.
Daniels provided an updated memo a few hours after being interviewed for this story, moments before the City Council met to discuss the RDA Wednesday evening. The council did not take immediate action.
The new memo added a different case to the analysis and changed at least one of the quotes that had been implied to have come from a nonexistent lawsuit to Daniels’ own words. He did not change the June 4 date on the document.
The question of the extent of his AI use aside, the main thrust of Daniels’ memo is incorrect, Barrick said — taxing entity committees have “broad power” from the state to set their own rules, including requiring yearly meetings.
Daniels became the RDA director in December 2023, but he is a contract employee. Vineyard paid a firm matching his LinkedIn profile, Civique Strategies, $49,350 in 2024 and just under $35,000 so far in 2025.
Daniels’ memo contains additional information watchdogs find questionable. It claims the now lapsed taxing entity committee removed a cumulative cap on the tax revenue the RDA can collect in January 2011.
“They thought, ‘We’re already capping [tax collection] at 25 years, so we don’t need a specific dollar cap,’” Daniels said in an interview. “That was kind of my understanding of the discussions at the time.”
That surprised Council member Jacob Holdaway, who said Daniels has repeatedly mentioned a $300 million ceiling on the total amount the RDA can collect.
“It’s deeply troubling,” Holdaway said in a statement. “There has already been a great deal of mistrust surrounding how the Vineyard RDA operates.”
Fullmer, the mayor, used the RDA to pledge $5 million to a private development project that would have dredged Utah Lake and turned it into an island city. That came as a shock to the Vineyard community, especially when residents learned the city’s lobbyist, Jeff Hartley, had an ownership stake in the dredging company.
RDA funds were also used to send city employees on pricey trips to Europe, and to pay $150,000 in dues for Fullmer’s ambassadorship with World Trade Center Utah.
Both Holdaway and Barrick said a lack of RDA oversight had particularly troubling implications for the main source of the agency’s tax revenue: Alpine schools.
School districts collect the biggest chunk of property tax revenue Utah County residents pay — nearly 68%, according to the county auditor. That doesn’t mean Alpine School District will miss out on the millions Vineyard’s RDA is set to receive from it each year. State law allows schools to shift the burden to other taxpayers in the district instead, so those property owners pay more to make up the difference.
“It creates resistance to raise taxes further to do the things a government body should be doing,” Barrick said, like building schools and paying teachers.
Barrick, who teaches at Brigham Young University, added that he has turned Daniels’ memo over to the state auditor. He noted that his opinions about the RDA’s operations are his own and do not reflect the views of BYU or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The RDA isn’t currently collecting property tax revenue across the entire former Geneva Steel site. Instead, the collection is trigged in phases as different portions of the site become ready for development, and the funds are funneled to the RDA for 25 years. The city was supposed to sunset the RDA after 35 years.
In 2020, Utah lawmakers passed SB158, creating a carveout so Vineyard could extend its RDA with no hard sunset date, which the city adopted in 2023. The bill specifically allowed the city to do so without getting taxing entity approval.
