Gov. Spencer Cox appointed Lonny Pehrson, who previously served as government records counsel for the Utah Attorney General’s Office, as the first director of the state’s new Government Records Office.
Cox made the announcement and praised Pehrson in a statement released Monday.
“We look forward to the Government Records Office streamlining the appeals process and helping Utahns get timely answers to their records requests,” the governor said. “Lonny Pehrson’s legal expertise and commitment to good governance make him the right person to lead this important effort.”
Pehrson’s appointment will need to be confirmed by the Utah Senate.
Earlier this year, the Legislature disbanded the citizen-led State Records Committee and replaced it with the single Government Records Officer, which will be responsible for deciding disputes over public records access and training local government records officers.
Proponents of the law argued that the appointment of a judge to oversee all requests would speed up the process, but the transition has furthered a backlog of cases. When the State Records Committee last met in April, there were 13 cases on the agenda, leaving about 70 others outstanding — and in limbo at least until Pehrson is officially on the job.
Much of how the new role will function, Mitch McKenney, a professor of media and journalism at Kent State University, told The Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year, will come down to who that officer is.
“There is so much riding on that person’s posture,” McKenney said then. And Pehrson has shown resistance to releasing government records in the past.
As the records officer in the attorney general’s office, Pehrson was responsible for deciding which records would be released under requests from the public and the media.
One of the key findings of a legislative audit of the attorney general’s office released earlier this year was that the attorney general is “not reasonably transparent, making it difficult for the public to hold the position accountable.”
In 2023, Pehrson refused to release then-Attorney General Sean Reyes’ official calendars under requests from KSL and The Salt Lake Tribune, and later argued before the State Records Committee that the law exempted calendars from GRAMA.
The Records Committee unanimously rejected that argument, and a state judge upheld that ruling, ordering the release of Reyes’ calendars. The day the judge’s ruling came out, the Legislature changed the law to exempt calendars from release going forward. The judge ordered the attorney general’s office to pay KSL $132,241 in attorneys fees stemming from the litigation.
Also in 2023, a judge criticized the office’s records management system as “haphazard” after Pehrson had to go office to office asking different departments to provide records that had been requested as part of a lawsuit against the attorney general. The records, initially requested in 2016, were eventually found on a thumb drive in a “junk draw” information technology director’s office five years later.
Pehrson previously argued against releasing an advisory opinion from the attorney general’s office regarding whether a special election was needed to fill the seat vacated by former Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
In a statement Monday, Pehrson said he looked forward to founding the new records office.
“I am honored to have been nominated for this position and truly appreciate the trust and responsibility that it entails,” Pehrson said in a statement Monday. “I look forward to establishing the Government Records Office, which will better facilitate access to government records in accordance with the law.”
