Courtesy Lake Restoration Solutions

On Friday, the State Records Committee voted unanimously to uphold that Vineyard City properly classified nearly every document in the case of Shawn Herring v. Vineyard.

Attending the hearing on behalf of the city were Jayme Blakesley, Ezra Nair and Pam Spencer, the city attorney, city manager and city recorder, respectively.

“The SRC commended the city for its process and praised the city recorder for her handling of this GRAMA request,” Nair told the Daily Herald.

The two documents that the committee deemed public with redactions are a W-9 — which was classified as private, but is public in redacted form — and the body of an email in which they deemed the attachment was appropriately classified as protected, Nair said.

The committee ruled that all other documents were appropriately classified.

Courtesy Woodbury Corp.

“Vineyard City continues to follow all of the same records retention processes and updates them regularly as new laws, recommendations and best practices come through the State Legislature,” Nair said.

Petitioners sought answers to many questions related to the Utah Lake Restoration Project and a letter of support, which was voted on by the city council in public meetings, according to Nair.

“I think we should be really alarmed and upset about this. We are talking about the biggest project that has ever come before the city or state, and there was not involvement from the planning commission, city planner, city engineering, public works and RDA committee,” said Jacob Holdaway, one of the principles in the appeal.

He added that the hearing gives petitioners options for the future.

“Bringing this to the State Records Committee gave our mayor and city council an opportunity to release documents and create a transparent government process,” Holdaway said. “Vineyard city staff confirmed that the mayor provided the $5 million loan guarantee with little to no communication or process. Unfortunately, the mayor argued and won to keep the few records that exist as sealed.”

Harrison Epstein, Daily Herald

Holdway noted those involved with appealing the decision will take the State Records Committee’s advice and take their argument to the Attorney General’s office and State Auditors’ office.

The SRC will provide its written decision within seven business days of the hearing.

Representatives of the City of Vineyard were asked to appear at a Thursday hearing of the State Records Committee to explain why a portion of a citizen’s records request was denied.

In January 2022, Vineyard resident Shawn Herring turned in several GRAMA requests to the city focused mostly on Lake Restoration Solutions LLC, a group proposing dramatic changes to Utah Lake. The proposal was deemed unconstitutional by state government officials in August and its project application was canceled in October, though the group has appealed the cancellation.

There are a number of projects wrapped up in Herring’s request that are not connected to each other according to Mayor Julie Fullmer, and the Lake Restoration Solutions plan was just one. There is also the Utah Lake Authority, created via the Utah Legislature in 2022, and the Walkara Way/Holdaway project that covers wetlands between Vineyard and Provo, led by the Holdaway family.

Holdaway, whose family has owned wetlands and lake bed in the area since Utah became a state, expressed concern for what will happen to the lake and believes the communications between the mayor and city manager via text messaging include needed information.

“There’s nothing bigger to happen in Vineyard city than LRS — not even Geneva Steel,” Holdaway said.

Herring and others opposed the Lake Restoration Solutions plan, which envisioned dredging the lake bed to create livable islands in the middle of the lake.

Of the requests to Vineyard, 125 individual public records were released to Herring and four were not, those four records being the subject of the records committee hearing.

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