SALT LAKE CITY—A hotly contested bill passed during the 2025 Legislative Session was repealed by legislators during a Special Session held Dec. 9 at the Capitol. H.B. 276 Public Sector Labor Union Amendments has been a battle from the moment it was introduced. 

“I think the number one thing (in the session) was we repealed the union bill that prohibited public sector unions from collective bargaining,” said Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross. “Otherwise, because of the referendum it would have been on the ballot in November so we just took that issue off the table.”

The amount of signatures they collected showed that there was public support to keep the policy the way it had been before the bill last session, he said. “I just think taking it off the table it’s going to save a lot of people a lot of time and money. I think we would have had millions of dollars in TV ads on both sides of the issues. I just think the legislature has bigger fish to fry and that they don't want to have this debate all of 2026.”

The fact that they collected 320,000 signatures in a few weeks last spring kind of shows that the legislature touched a nerve, said Weiler. “The legislators try to listen to the people and say ‘OK well this is something that we’ll take off the table.’”  

Traditionally over the past decades candidates have filed for office in March, he said. “We recently made an effort to move that up to January not just for signature candidates but for everybody.”

Because of the chaos around redistricting and Judge Gibson’s rulings on the maps, Weiler said they just moved the filing back to March just for the four congressional House seats. “That’s just to give the legislature and the courts some more time to react to what has been a moving target.”

The final deadline for all of the other elected officials or candidates will remain in January except for the four seats for the U.S. House that we moved back to March,” he said. “Candidates for those four seats can still file in January and start collecting signatures but the actual filing for the office will be in March.”

There were some other more technical issues, Weiler said. “We clarified two things that I think are important. Number one if there’s a case that is substantively over but there’s just a question of whether attorney’s fees will be awarded and how much, that case can be finalized for appeal while the attorney’s fees are being sorted out by the district court judge. The purpose of that at this time was to allow the redistricting case to be finalized for a full appeal rather than dragging it out for three or four months over a fight of attorney’s fees.”

There’s also the clarification that for election controversies that those can go straight from the District Court to the Utah Supreme Court and not have to spend a year on the Utah Court of Appeals, he said. “They’re often involving an interpretation of the Utah Constitution and that power rests with the Supreme Court and with the Court of Appeals. I think our Court of Appeals has been overworked in the past couple of years and our Supreme Court is issuing the fewest decision of almost any Supreme Court in the country.”

This is also something that would speed up potentially the appeal of the redistricting case, Weiler said. “I think it also makes sense because we have a backlog at the Court of Appeals and we seem to have a lot of unused capacity at the Supreme Court level right now.”

Those were the main issues in the Special Session, he said. “There’s also a resolution kind of condemning the courts for trying to take the legislative redistrict power unto itself and asking that all three branches respect the powers and duties assigned to the other branches.”

However, it’s a resolution with no teeth, said Weiler. “It’s kind of pounding your chest and waving your fist in the air. Sort of action but it doesn’t actually do anything except make a statement.”

For the legislators who wanted to impeach the judge it’s at least something that they can point out and say "Well, we did something,” he said. “You didn’t impeach her, which I don’t support at this time, but we did do something.”