Provo, UT Outdoor Cooking: Smoker Rules (2026)

Provo's open-burning ordinance treats backyard cooking as two separate cases. Section 9.51.040(2)(b) automatically exempts a contained barbecue or pit six feet in diameter or smaller. Everything bigger or differently built, a large offset smoker, a built-in masonry cooking pit, a drum smoker exceeding that size, falls to Subsection (2)(c) instead: 'Other outdoor cooking facilities meeting the approval of the authority having jurisdiction.' Unlike the automatic six-foot exemption, this clause is conditional: the exemption only applies once the fire authority having jurisdiction, Provo's Fire Marshal's office under the adopted International Fire Code, has signed off on the specific facility.

That two-tier structure matters practically. A resident running a small contained grill never has to ask permission; Subsection (2)(b) already covers it. A resident running a smoker too large to be 'contained' within a six-foot cooking area, or built from something other than a barbecue or pit, needs to secure approval under (2)(c) before using it, or the setup reverts to the Subsection (1) default: 'it shall be unlawful for any person to create or permit to be created an open burning of any kind.'

The same Chapter 9.51 gives the fire authority broad interpretive reach elsewhere too. Section 9.51.010 adopts the International Fire Code and its appendices by reference under Utah Code Title 15A, Chapter 5, the same authority the fire code director draws on when evaluating an unlisted cooking facility under (2)(c). Because the chapter folds in state-adopted Fire Code editions automatically whenever the legislature updates them, the approval standard a smoker has to meet can shift with each new Fire Code cycle without a local ordinance amendment.