SALT LAKE CITY — After spending a year living out of her car, Rachel Ortiz said she does everything she can to avoid going back to that life. And that includes keeping a very tight budget.

“Unexpected things come up and I’m able to pay them thankfully, but a lot of people aren’t able to do that,” Ortiz said.

But her carefully planned budget blew up on her when her Salt Lake City apartment turned out to be not as affordable as advertised.

The listed rent price for her place was $869. But each month, Ortiz pays nearly a hundred dollars more to live there – not including utilities.

The reason? Hidden rental fees.

“It’s hard to afford a place nowadays with the rent, and if the inflation is going up,” she said.

The monthly add-ons driving up rent

Ortiz’s monthly fees include $10 for pest control. Another $14 goes to her place’s liability waiver program — an alternative to the required renter’s insurance. And with no adjacent street parking available, she also must pay $25 for parking: covered or uncovered. On top of those fees, there’s a $16 “real estate tax” for her share of the complex’s property taxes.

“I mean, they want to charge you separate for every little thing,” Ortiz said.

She also shares the costs of landscaping, maintenance, snow removal, security and utility bills for her place’s common areas. That fee varies, but last month it came to $32.

“I go to pay this amount, and then you tell me it’s this amount,” she said. “And I have this amount for the rent.”

Fees renters report paying nationwide

Ortiz isn’t alone in having to tackle monthly rent inflated by hidden rental fees. Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on rental fees every year, according to a National Consumer Law Center study. That same study identified 27 distinct types of fees renters are paying in addition to their rent.

Those include a fee for having a guest over. Some renters pay an additional fee for the landlord to process their rent payments. Some pay for mandatory trash pick-up or valet service even though they want to take their garbage to the dumpster on their own. Some tenants report having to pay fees to receive packages or to get their mail sorted.

What current law protects renters

Since 2021, landlords in Utah have been required to disclose all fees before taking an application fee.

“The tenants, when they are touring those apartment communities, the law is that they have to disclose all the fees,” said Derek Seal of the Utah Rental Housing Association – a leading trade association for landlords, property managers and others linked to the rental housing industry. “We want people and tenants to be able to make informed decisions.”

Seal says the current law already prevents a landlord from charging a fee that wasn’t disclosed before the renter signed the lease. On the flip side, if a fee was disclosed in the lease – he says renters really don’t have room to complain.

“They have a responsibility to understand the agreement … that they’re getting into,” he said.

What HB29 would change

But now, HB29 aims to require fee disclosure well before a prospective tenant sees an agreement. It wants it to happen in the advertising.

“It’s setting a standard,” said the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo. “We’re making sure that they (consumers) have an expectation that the marketplace is being honest and transparent.”

HB29 bans hidden rental fees by requiring a listing or an advertisement for a rental to disclose the total price.

“When you’re not being upfront about your price, that could be anti-competitive in nature because you’re not really advertising your product,” Clancy said. “Setting an expectation that families can know if something fits into their budget or not, I think that’s a reasonable thing.”

“The extra fees then should be baked into the price,” said Katie Hass, who leads Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection — which will enforce HB29 if it passes.

They have a responsibility to understand the agreement … that they’re getting into.

–Derek Seal, Utah Rental Housing Association

She says the listed rental price must reflect the real price a tenant will have to pay to live there, excluding personal utilities. And that price, she said, cannot be a range that depends on variable or seasonal fees.

“You (landlords) get to set your own prices,” she said. “You just have to be truthful what’s included in that price and what’s optional at the end of the transaction.”

Federal scrutiny and Greystar’s response

At least eleven other states have similar laws about disclosing hidden rental fees in listings or ads. And in December, the Federal Trade Commission and the State of Colorado reached a $24 million settlement with rental housing giant Greystar over allegations it deceived renters with hidden fees.

“These little fees, at the end, they create a bitterness to our economy that we don’t want here in Utah,” Hass said.

KSL reached out to Greystar about the settlement, who pointed us to their Dec. 2, 2025 statement that reads in part, “The agreement contains no admission of wrongdoing, and Greystar continues to maintain, as it has from the start of this matter, that its advertising has always been transparent, fair, and fully consistent with the longstanding industrywide practice of advertising base rent to potential residents.”

In that same statement, Greystar also says the agreement clarifies the FTC’s position “that federal law requires displaying the Total Monthly Leasing Price, including base rent and all mandatory fees, when advertising housing for rent.”

One renter’s reaction as ownership changes

As for Rachel Ortiz, she does feel bitterness toward all the fees she has to pay on top of her rent.

“It’s become like really greedy,” she lamented. “They start thinking with this (pointing to her head) and stop thinking with this (tapping her heart).”

She just recently learned her home has been bought out by Greystar. She now hopes her new landlord will be more transparent.

“It’s just too much,” she said.

What renters can do right now

If passed, HB29 would not take effect until July 1, 2026.

As a renter, the best thing you can do is, before touring a place, contact the landlord and request a full breakdown of all monthly costs you’re expected to pay, as well as any one-time fees, such as a lease initiation fee. And it doesn’t hurt to try to negotiate. Ask whether they’ll consider waiving a fee or maybe lowering the rent to offset the fee costs.

Derek Seal said the Utah Rental Housing Association maintains a fund that reimburses application fees for renters who did not receive full disclosure when they applied. You can apply on their webpage.

Clarkston • Curtis Godfrey has spent his entire 72 years in Clarkston, a small northern Utah farming town of about 750 people, tucked by the western slopes of Clarkston Mountain.

As a boy, Godfrey said he often roamed the mountain trails on horseback and hiked through Winter Canyon, a rugged landscape familiar to generations of families in his hometown.

Over the years, he returned with his children — and later with Boy Scout troops — clearing brush and helping maintain the narrow paths that wind up the mountain’s steep slopes.

“My first few times going up there were always on a horse. We’d have them shuttling the ponies and the first time I went up, I was like 10, 12 years old, and I was bareback on one of those,” Godfrey said, laughing at the memory. “It was just me, my brother, and some friends.”

The mountains form the western edge of Cache Valley along the Utah–Idaho border, part of the Malad Range and crowned by the 8,200-foot Gunsight Peak. The ridge is a patchwork of U.S. Forest Service land and private parcels.

But access to those mountains has become the center of a legal battle after a private landowner started blocking off access to paths that lead into the foothills.

Scott Shriber, who owns an 800-acre ranch at the base of the ridge near Gunsight Peak, says the routes now in question are private trails crossing his land, not public county roads.

He put up “No trespassing” signs, cameras and fencing around his property — and the paths leading into the mountains.

However, Godfrey and other residents say for decades, the paths have been used to access public lands on Clarkston Mountain — through Winter Canyon, Elbow Canyon, Green Canyon, Old Canyon and New Quigley Canyon.

Cache County Executive George Daines said the dispute reflects a broader tension playing out across Utah, where long-standing recreational use is increasingly colliding with changing land ownership and shifting interpretations of public access law.

How the case is resolved, he said, could influence how Cache County — and other communities across the state — handle similar conflicts in the future.

“It’s an ongoing problem all up and down the state,” Daines said. “Landowner buys land that’s on the foothills of the mountains and wants to restrain citizens from going through the foothills to the mountains that are public.”

Tensions flare in Winter Canyon

The dispute has turned into dueling lawsuits in the Utah’s First District Court in Logan.

In 2024, Shriber and his company, Winter Canyon Ranch LLC, sued Cache County over the contested routes.

In response, a group of residents formed Clarkston Mountain Conservation, a nonprofit advocating for continued public access, and filed a separate suit against the landowner alongside BlueRibbon Coalition, an Idaho-based national nonprofit that pushes for recreational access to public lands.

The debate escalated in November, when a BlueRibbon Coalition member riding a dirt bike along the path leading into Winter Canyon was stopped by Shriber and three other men.

Shriber is seen in a video with a gun strapped to his chest as he spoke to the man. Both Shriber and the man called the Cache County Sheriff’s Office, according to a probable cause statement. Shriber was arrested on suspicion of unlawful detention, but no charges appear in court records.

The man recorded the encounter and provided the video to the BlueRibbon Coalition, which provided it to The Salt Lake Tribune with the faces blurred.

In December, Cache County Sheriff Chad Jensen said in a statement that motorized vehicles are not permitted on the routes, and access is allowed only by walking, hiking, biking or horseback while litigation is ongoing.

“Please note that any movement off the designated roads may be considered trespassing,” Jensen said. “We do not want a violent incident due to a trespassing issue.”

Daines, the county executive, said the question of whether — and how — the routes are open to the public during the litigation has caused confusion on both sides, and the issue will likely head back to court for clarification.

A dispute over access

If the routes are blocked off by the ranch, BlueRibbon Executive Director Ben Burr said, public access into the mountain would be cut off.

“If he succeeds at this, he will be land-locking the public almost entirely out of high-value recreation public land that’s otherwise owned by the Forest Service and should be there, available for all of us to go use and enjoy,” Burr said. “We won’t be able to because we can no longer use the long-standing county roads that have been getting us up there for forever.”

Since the 1860s, Burr said, settlers and residents have accessed the slopes through the contested routes for gathering wood, livestock grazing, hunting and travel. Over time, he said, the paths were also used for recreation, including dirt bikes and ATVs.

“Some of these roads were there before the private property deeds were even created,” Burr said. “The community there has been using those trails continuously since they’ve been settled.”

Until 2023, the private land on the mountain was held by families who had owned it for generations, some dating back before 1900, according to Winter Canyon Ranch’s complaint.

That year, the complaint says, Shriber purchased several adjacent parcels near Gunsight Peak, established Winter Canyon Ranch, and became the primary private landowner, holding seven parcels.

Shriber’s attorney, Bruce Baird, said the disputed routes were never legal public roads.

“There’s a state statute that says if the public has used a road for 10 continuous years, it’s dedicated as a highway,” Baird said. “There’s no evidence that the public has used these trails as a road, basically at all.”

Baird said that while residents may have used the routes for hiking, horseback riding and dirt biking, that kind of use doesn’t qualify the paths as public “highways” under Utah law.

He said the statute applies to roads used for standard vehicle travel, not narrow trails used primarily for recreation.

Residents and advocacy groups counter that the routes have long been mapped and labeled by the county as public roads, which Burr said is reflected in the warranty deed noting the sale excluded county roads.

Decades of continuous use, he said, have created public rights-of-way under Utah law.

Ben Burt, who has lived in Clarkston for more than a decade, said he respects Shriber’s rights as a property owner but believes the trails should remain open to the public.

Burt said many live in rural areas “because we care about our property.”

“We want to have a say about our property. So we understand that this guy wants to be able to develop on his property,” Burt said. “It’s not right for them to be able to cut off complete access to that federal land. That’s the difference.”

For many in Cache Valley, Burt said, access to trails in their own backyard is part of the lifestyle that draws them to the area.

Godfrey, the Clarkston resident who grew up with the trails, said protecting access isn’t just about recreation — it’s about preserving decades of family tradition. The trails carry memories of childhood horseback rides, hunting trips, scouting outings and long summer hikes — experiences he hopes to share with his grandchildren.

“I have a bunch of grandkids. They’re getting older, too, but I haven’t had them up there, but I want to; I want them to be able to go,” he said. “That’s one of my concerns, is the things that I’ve enjoyed growing up, and the scouting and taking my family up there, if he gets his way, we won’t be able to do that.”