Surrounded by peers from different organizations representing Utah teachers, local government employees, police officers, municipal workers and more, Scott Stephenson, executive director of the Utah Fraternal Order of Police said he was “optimistically happy that this could potentially happen tomorrow.”

“The referendum. All the signatures. Over 5,000 volunteers, 320,000 signatures in 30 days. That’s awesome,” Stephenson said. “That’s not a message. That’s an indictment to the Legislature. Going into these negotiations, knowing that 320,000 people support us, gave us a lot of leverage.”

Protect Utah Workers, a coalition of public and private unions that pushed hard to repeal the law, had been in negotiations with lawmakers for the past month and a half, Stephenson said.

“To their credit, they listened to us and they agreed with us that this is what needs to happen,” he said.

The legislation was scheduled to become effective in July, but was put on hold as unions quickly surpassed the signature threshold for a ballot initiative that could have repealed the bill.

Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill within days of it passing. However, in a social media post Sunday, Cox said he supports the repeal.

“(I) appreciate the Legislature’s work to refocus this conversation to ensure government is doing its best to support our first responders, educators, and all those who serve our state,” he wrote.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz announced Sunday night that the Legislature would consider repealing HB267, titled Public Sector Labor Union Amendments, during the special session scheduled Tuesday.

“It’s clear that the heated debate around these issues has created unnecessary division, which was never the intent,” Adams and Schultz said in a release. “Repealing the bill allows us to reset the discussion and move forward to ensure we get this right.”

Now, the release says, legislative leaders and the unions are committed to working together in good faith on future proposals.

If HB267 had become effective, it would have prohibited public sector unions from negotiating terms of employment with their employers, an action that union members described as an existential threat. Proponents, however, said the bill would protect taxpayer dollars and give all public employees a voice, not just union members.

It was the third year legislators had made a proposal aiming to change how public unions negotiate contracts with their employers.

Renée Pinkney, president of the Utah Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, said on Monday she expects the Legislature to repeal the bill during the special session. However, she doesn’t think this will be the end of the unions’ fight.

“We’ll be working together (with legislators) in a work group in order to move forward,” Pinkney said.

If lawmakers vote to repeal the bill on Tuesday, they will be doing the same thing that would have happened at the polls, Pinkney said.

“We know that this is a win for the voters, and it’s a win for all of the volunteers. We had 5,000 volunteers who helped us gather signatures,” Pinkney said. “The resources that were expended, time, people and money, we are just incredibly appreciative of all of those people who helped us, and we are appreciative that the Legislature listened to those people.”

While union leaders are happy with the outcome, they have also received comments from concerned voters, who worry that had the question gone to the ballot in 2026, it would have provided stronger protections to unions, especially with the Utah Supreme Court decision on an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit, that said “an initiative is constitutionally protected from government infringement.”

“That’s some of the comments I’ve been given because you have the redistricting issue, that’s a very important issue for people to get involved in,” Stephenson said. “And they were just hoping that there’s one less thing that they have to worry about.”

The ballot initiative may no longer be an issue in the 2026 midterms, Stephenson said, but with other questions and elections on the line, he encourages Utahns to still show up at the polls to make their voices heard.

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.