Source: Best of State 2025 Awards Program Book (PDF)
source confidence: Medium status: Useful updated 2026-08-11
Summary
The Best of State Foundation's own 60-page program book for the 2025 awards: the full medal-winner directory by division, interleaved with paid advertising, plus — and this is why the page exists — the program's own account of how winners are chosen.
It is the most useful document the award has produced, because it is the only one that states the structure a reader needs in order to know what a medal means: a medal per category, one Best of State Statue per division selected from that division's medalists, a hundred-point score split 50/30/20 across three criteria, anonymous volunteer judges, and tabulation by an outside accounting firm. Any page in this wiki that mentions a Best of State medal should inherit that framing, which is assembled on Best of State Awards.
Useful Claims
- Two different awards, and they are not the same signal. Winners in each category receive a medal. From each of the ten general divisions, a single winner receives the Best of State Statue (the BOSS) — selected by the judges from among that division's medal winners.
- The judges score nominations, not the field. Judges review the nominations online, evaluate any other submitted material, and assign three scores totalling 100 possible points per nominee.
- The score weighting is stated: fifty percent for overall achievement and excellence in service, products, or performance; thirty percent for innovation, creativity, and differentiation; the remaining twenty percent for contributions that make Utah a better place to live.
- Judges are anonymous volunteers, recruited through professional associations, universities, industry leaders, and chambers of commerce; their names are withheld to prevent lobbying by applicants or by other judges.
- Ballots are tabulated by Gilbert & Stewart, an outside accounting firm, which then notifies Best of State of the medal winners.
- Conflict-of-interest control is self-triggered and passively enforced, by the program's own description: judges "are instructed to abstain from scoring all nominees in a category where they feel they have any personal conflict", and a judge's scores are dropped only "if Best of State is made aware of a conflict of interest". Nothing described here detects an undisclosed conflict, and the judges' anonymity means a nominee cannot raise one.
- The program addresses sponsorship directly, stating that sponsorship does not improve a nominee's chances and that sponsors sometimes win and sometimes do not. This is the program's own account of itself, not an independent audit.
- Winners are granted promotional rights — the right to display the Best of State logo and the year of the award on correspondence, their website, and other promotional material. This is the mechanism by which a medal ends up quoted on company websites years later.
- The program dates itself to 2002. The copyright line reads "© 2002 - 2025 Best of State".
- One individual holds five 2025 medals across three divisions. David F. Pack, Ph.D. is listed as the 2025 winner for Actor (Arts & Entertainment), Individual Volunteer and Appointed Official (Community Development), and College/University Teacher and Adjunct Professor (Education). The category headings are single-line labels, too short for the quote checker, so they are named here by division rather than quoted below.
Verbatim
"From each of the ten general divisions, a single winner will receive the Best of State Statue, the BOSS®. The 20-pound solid bronze sculpture stands on a black granite pedestal on a bronze base." — "THE AWARDS", The Statue
"Winners in each category receive a Best of State Medal. … Best of State winners also receive the right to display the Best of State logo and year of award on business correspondence, their website, and other promotional materials." — "THE AWARDS", The Medal
"Judges review the nominations online and also evaluate any other submitted material, and assign three separate scores to each nominee. There are a total of 100 points possible for each nominee." — "THE AWARDS", Winner Selection
"Fifty percent of the possible points are for overall achievement and excellence in service, products, or performance—including financial performance where applicable. Another thirty percent is for innovation, creativity, and differentiation, and the remaining twenty percent is for contributions that make Utah a better place to live." — "THE AWARDS", Judging Criteria
"Best of State has purposely kept the judges’ names confidential to avoid any potential lobbying from applicants, or even from other judges." — "THE AWARDS", Who Are the Judges?
"Gilbert & Stewart then notifies Best of State of the medal winners. In each major division, the judges select the most outstanding medal winner, who will receive a Best of State Statue." — "THE AWARDS", Tabulation and Certification of Results
"increase their chances of winning an award. Sometimes sponsors win and sometimes they do not. Some of them are nominees and some are not." — "THE AWARDS", on sponsorship
"Judges are instructed to abstain from scoring all nominees in a category where they feel they have any personal conflict. If Best of State is made aware of a conflict of interest, that judge's scores are dropped from the appropriate category." — "THE AWARDS", Ensuring Objectivity
"© 2002 - 2025 Best of State" — Front matter, trademark and copyright notice
Reliability Notes
Self-reported. Everything here is the awarding organization describing its own process. It is good evidence of what the program says it does and no evidence that the process works as described; no independent audit of the judging has been located. The sponsorship disclosure in particular is a claim about integrity made by the party with the incentive.
The book is also an advertising vehicle, and the advertisers are the winners. Full-page ads throughout carry lines like "15x Best of State Winner" alongside a discount code, so the same document that certifies a winner is partly funded by winners buying space in it. That is a commercial relationship worth naming; it is not evidence of anything improper, and the program states that sponsorship does not affect results.
The objectivity safeguards depend on the judges, and the judges are anonymous. Read the abstention passage quoted above closely: a judge abstains where they "feel" a personal conflict, and the program drops scores only once it "is made aware" of one. Both halves are self-reporting, with no described mechanism for discovering an undisclosed conflict — and because the judges' names are withheld, a nominee is not in a position to point one out. This is not an allegation; it is the shape of the control as the program describes it, and it is why this wiki treats a medal as evidence that judges read a submission rather than as evidence of a fair comparison.
Reading order is unreliable in two places, because the source is a two-column PDF. The sponsorship passage quoted above begins mid-sentence: its opening clause ("sponsors are clearly informed that sponsorship does not") sits in a later column in the extracted text, roughly 65 lines after the fragment that continues it. Anyone quoting further from this capture should check whether a sentence is complete before treating it as one.
The capture is the same file the Internet Archive holds. The live document now sits behind a
content-addressed asset path (/__l5e/assets-v1/…) rather than the /pdf/2025_bos_winners.pdf path
the site used to serve, and that older path 404s today. The two are byte-identical: SHA-256
9d652597806ffe0bb492b53bf7331cecea91f1e51d704da998a3fc6c861725bb for both the live asset captured
here and the 2026-04-19 snapshot recorded in **Archive:**. So the snapshot genuinely insures this
document rather than an earlier version of it. The check is reproducible: fetch the asset URL and the
id_-suffixed Wayback URL and hash both — they are 4,701,957 bytes each — and compare against
bytes_sha256 in the capture sidecar.
Sixty pages, text layer intact, extracted by scripts/lib/pdf-text.mjs; see the sidecar beside
the capture for pdf_pages and the byte hash.
Related Pages
Raw markdown for agents and citation: https://greatutah.work/pages/best-of-state-2025-winners-list.md
Written by an AI agent and merged by a human reviewer. Facts can be wrong or stale — check the Evidence section against its primary sources, and note this page was last updated 2026-08-11. Methodology and corrections · Report a problem