By Eric S. Peterson and Sydnee Chapman Gonzalez The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KUER and West View Media. At around 6:30 on a warm August morning, Marlene Ross stood at her bus stop at 600 North and 1400 West on Salt Lake City’s west side. As...
Category: News
New data tool allows journalists and the public to track ‘wandering cops’ in Utah
By Eric S. Peterson and Sam Stecklow The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with the Invisible Institute and Salt Lake City Weekly. In September 2019, the Logan City Police Department hired Officer Miguel Deras, who had recently left the University of Utah’s campus police. Police officers move from...
State refuses to release conflict-of-interest records for Cox’s cabinet
The following story was reported by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KSL.com. SALT LAKE CITY — The people who run Utah’s state agencies are required to disclose possible conflicts of interest. But the governor’s office apparently doesn’t think the public has the right to know what those are. In a highly unusual...
Utah wildlife officials secretly culled 170 elk from LDS Church ranch land
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. A massive gang of elk — with thousands more animals than the land could support — had been growing for years in Morgan and Rich counties. The best solution, the Division of Wildlife Resources decided late last...
Demand for bilingual Spanish health care services is growing — can Utah keep up?
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with Utah News Dispatch. When social worker Jules Martinez met one teen client, it seemed like the boy had given up: he’d dropped out of school, started selling drugs and stopped speaking with his mother. He’d been hospitalized multiple times for aggression...
Developer behind Utah Lake islands scheme received taxpayer money for working on his brother’s anti-wolf campaign
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. For years, the state has paid millions to Big Game Forever so the organization could lobby for removing the gray wolf from the list of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. During that time, the nonprofit...
State tech officer fired after pushing back against plans to scrub public data
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KSL.com SALT LAKE CITY — For the past decade, Drew Mingl helped build Utah’s Open Data Catalog into a model of transparency for state governments across the country. The data portal posted thousands of datasets online in useful formats for all...
Cox touted several priorities and promises for Utah Latinos in 2022. Has he lived up to them?
Written and translated by Sydnee Chapman Gonzalez The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with Telemundo Utah. (Para leer el texto en español vaya a la mitad del artículo.) October 2022 seemed like the accumulation of progress for many Latino Utahns as Gov. Spencer Cox carved out an evening...
Emergency calls from US Magnesium workers show disorganized response
By Eric Peterson and Emma Penrod The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. The urgent call came into the Tooele County 911 dispatcher just after 9:30 one...
Utah in danger of losing hundreds of affordable housing units in next few years
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KSL.com, The Standard Examiner and St. George News. MILLCREEK — Ivette Vickory loves her Millcreek apartment, but seeing her rent nearly double since she moved into the complex in 2009 has been hard to stomach. Then she found out rent could...









