Anyone Can Ask a State Agency to Write a Rule. Four of Them Have to Answer on a Clock.
Most people who care about a privacy regulation experience it as weather. A notice appears, a comment window opens for forty-five days, you write something, the window closes. If you missed it, you wait for the next one. Nobody tells you when that is.
That is one of two doors, and it is the one everybody uses.
The other door is a petition for rulemaking, and in four states the agency is required by statute to answer it in writing, on a deadline, whether or not it agrees with a word you wrote.
I read the four statutes this week. Here they are.
Connecticut — thirty days
Conn. Gen. Stat. § 4-174, quoted in full, because it is short enough to quote in full:
"Any interested person may petition an agency requesting the promulgation, amendment, or repeal of a regulation. Each agency shall prescribe by regulation the form for petitions and the procedure for their submission, consideration, and disposition. Within thirty days after submission of a petition, the agency either shall deny the petition in writing stating its reasons for the denials or shall initiate regulation-making proceedings in accordance with section 4-168."
Thirty days. Two outcomes, no third.
Note what a denial actually is: a written statement of the agency's reasons, on the public record, obtained for the price of one letter. That is not a consolation prize. If you wanted to know an agency's position on a question and had no other way to ask, that is the way to ask.
One caveat before you spend a letter. Connecticut case law has held that § 4-174 is not intended to grant a petition right to a person with no specific, legally protectible interest. Frame the petition around a concrete stake — prospective registrant, prospective contractor, affected consumer — not general policy enthusiasm.
New Jersey — fifteen days, and this one publishes you
N.J.A.C. 13:45A-19.1 is the strongest of the four, and it is not close.
Within fifteen days of receiving a petition, the Director must file a notice of the petition with the Office of Administrative Law for publication in the New Jersey Register.
Read that again. The filing itself becomes a public docket item — not the agency's response to it, the petition. Whether the Division agrees with you, disagrees with you, or thinks you have lost your mind, the argument gets printed.
Then within sixty days the Director must mail the petitioner a notice of action and file it with the OAL, choosing one of three paths: deny it with written reasons, grant it and begin rulemaking within ninety days, or refer it for further deliberation concluding within ninety days.
The petition has content requirements, and they are the useful kind. The petitioner must give a name and address, the substance of the request, the problem or purpose behind it, the petitioner's interest in it, the proposed text of the new or amended rule, and the statutory authority under which the action may be taken.
That is a specification, not a hurdle. An agency handed prose has to translate it before it can act. An agency handed a drafted subdivision can adopt it, amend it, or reject it on its face — and has to say which.
Oregon — ninety days
"Not later than 90 days after the date of submission of a petition, the agency either shall deny the petition in writing or shall initiate rulemaking proceedings in accordance with ORS 183.335."
Same architecture as Connecticut, longer fuse.
Oregon has a second, softer route worth knowing about. Its regulators convene rules advisory committees before proposing rules, and asking whether one might be convened — or simply asking to be told when one is — is a smaller ask than a petition and does not spend the petition. A committee is where the question of what is practical to require gets worked out, which is usually the question that actually decides the rule.
Texas — sixty days, with a catch that matters
Tex. Gov't Code § 2001.021 gives sixty days and the same two outcomes: deny in writing stating reasons, or initiate a rulemaking proceeding.
The catch is standing. Texas restricts the petition right to a state resident, a business entity located in the state, a governmental subdivision, or a public or private organization — and where signatures are gathered, at least 51% must come from Texas residents.
An out-of-state company cannot simply file. I am in California, so this door is not open to me, and I would rather say so than discover it after mailing something.
Worth knowing regardless, because it trips people constantly: Texas's data broker provisions sit at Business & Commerce Code Chapter 510, redesignated from Chapter 509 in 2025 after the legislature enacted two different Chapter 509s in the same session. Several state pages still say 509. Both are describing something real; only one is current.
Why this matters more in privacy than in most fields
Privacy rulemaking is unusually lumpy.
Registries go live years after the statute passes. Feasibility studies report an interim finding in one year and a final in the next. Enforcement rules get drafted in the quiet stretch when nobody is watching, and the comment window opens after the hard architectural choices have already been made inside the agency.
A comment is a response to someone else's text. A petition arrives before the text exists. That is the whole difference, and it is why the four statutes above are worth more than their obscurity suggests.
And here is the thing almost nobody believes until they check: these rooms are usually empty. At the California Privacy Protection Agency's August board meeting, the chair called for public comment on item after item — items 3, 10, 11, 12, 13 — and no hands went up on any of them. Not a crowd getting drowned out. An empty room, and a transcript with space in it.
Disclosure
I run Sirveil, a two-person California company whose service determines whether a named individual's information is publicly indexed at a named website at a given moment. I have a commercial interest in how deletion and verification get regulated, I disclose it in every filing I make, and it is why I went looking for these doors in the first place.
That interest is a reason to read what I write skeptically. It is not a reason to leave the doors unopened. None of the four statutes above cares who you are — except Texas, which cares where you live.
Frequently asked questions
Who can file a petition for rulemaking?
In Connecticut, "any interested person," subject to case law holding that the petitioner needs a specific, legally protectible interest rather than general policy concern. Oregon and New Jersey do not impose a residency requirement in the provisions cited here. Texas is the outlier: Gov't Code § 2001.021 limits the right to a state resident, an in-state business entity, a governmental subdivision, or a public or private organization, and requires that at least 51% of any signatures come from Texas residents.
What happens if the agency says no?
In all four states, a denial must be in writing. Connecticut, Oregon and Texas each require the agency to state its reasons. That written denial is a public record of the agency's position on the question you raised — which is often the thing you were actually trying to obtain.
How is a petition different from a public comment?
A comment responds to a proposal the agency has already drafted and published. A petition asks the agency to begin drafting, and can supply the proposed text itself. New Jersey requires proposed rule text as part of the petition. Timing is the substantive difference: a comment arrives after the agency's architectural choices are made, a petition before.
Does filing a petition guarantee a rule?
No. In every one of the four states, initiating rulemaking is one of two or three permitted responses, and denial is always available. What is guaranteed is a written response within the statutory period.
Does any of this apply to federal agencies?
The four statutes discussed here are state administrative procedure provisions and apply only to agencies of those states. Federal petition rights exist under the federal Administrative Procedure Act but are not covered in this article.
Sources: Conn. Gen. Stat. § 4-174 · N.J.A.C. 13:45A-19.1 · ORS 183.390 · Tex. Gov't Code § 2001.021. All read 5 September 2026.
NONE OF THIS CONSTITUTES LEGAL ADVICE. The author writes as a commercial party with a disclosed interest, not as counsel. Administrative procedure varies by state and by agency, and several of these statutes direct agencies to prescribe their own petition forms and procedures by regulation. Confirm the current requirements with the agency and with your own counsel before filing anything.