The claim
The city’s petition agreement strips sponsors’ rights
“To print our packets we have to sign a contract that waives our constitutional right to a jury trial, grants the city total governmental immunity, and severely limits our legal remedies while shifting liability onto citizens.”
Seen: Referendum organizing post, Eagle Mountain Facebook group, October 2026. First seen October 7, 2026.
Built on a real figure, used to say something the figure does not support.
The draft does have a jury-trial waiver and a cap on what the sponsor can recover, but the post describes them as more than they are. The jury waiver binds the city too, the immunity clause only says the city keeps the immunity state law already gives it, and nothing in the draft makes a sponsor liable for anything. Adding terms beyond the two the law lists isn’t barred by the statute.
The numbers
What’s true
State law asks the circulation agreement to settle two things, packet format and packet numbers (§ 20A-7-604(6)(a)(iii)). The city’s draft settles those in two lines and then adds more. The statute lists what the agreement must specify; it doesn’t say the agreement can’t contain anything else. Section 6 makes specific performance the sponsor’s “sole and exclusive remedy” and says the clerk and the city are never liable to the sponsor for “indirect, special, punitive, incidental or consequential damages,” including “costs of delay.” Section 7(h) sends any dispute to the Fourth District Court in Utah County and has both parties waive “any right to trial by jury” to the extent the law allows. The sponsor’s signature must also be notarized.
Where it goes wrong
The jury waiver is mutual: the city gives up a jury too, and it covers only disputes arising out of the agreement. The immunity clause, section 7(a), grants nothing new; it says the agreement isn’t a waiver of the defenses and liability limits the city recorder already has under the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah. And no term makes the sponsor answerable to the city or anyone else: there is no indemnity clause, and the damages limit in section 6 runs one way, protecting the city. The remedy limit is real and one-sided, since only the sponsor’s remedies are capped, but it limits what a sponsor can recover for a breach of the agreement; it is not a waiver of the sponsors’ rights under the election code.
More detail
The remedy limit applies to claims “under this Agreement.” It doesn’t mention the election code’s own route to court: if the recorder declares the petition insufficient, § 20A-7-607(5) lets any voter, not only a sponsor, ask a court within 10 days to find it sufficient. Whether a court would read section 6 to reach further than its words is a question for a lawyer, not this page.
The rest of section 7 is standard contract language: no waiver unless in writing, amendments only in writing, Utah law governs, neither side is presumed to have drafted it, no third-party rights, no partnership, and the document is the whole agreement.
The draft is the version the sponsors published. Whether the city has offered a different one since isn’t on the record.
Where this comes from
Every finding here is drawn from an open-meeting recording or a published document. Check it yourself.
Read more on this site
More checks on how it was decided
- Unsupported by the recordThe tax was rushed through in secret
- Accurate, but incompleteSigning the petition repeals the tax
- Not accurateThe mayor's pamphlet argument was filed late
- Accurate, but incompleteThe city published sponsors' home addresses
Checked October 23, 2026. Nothing goes on the fact-check list unless an open-meeting recording or a published document can settle it: the rules. Spot a mistake? civicrollcall@gmail.com