SALT LAKE CITY – Opinions are flying about the latest news of the proposed Stratos Data Center in Box Elder County and one of them suggests that opponents of that project have scored a pyrrhic victory at best.
“Utah politicians and developers play dirty,” warns Caroline Gleich, a former 2024 Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. “When they don’t get their way, they change the rules of the game.”
Just four days after the Box Elder Commission took the first step toward approval of the controversial project, its developers have withdraw their application to transfer 1,900 acre-feet of water under the remote Hansel Valley from ranching purposes to industrial uses, according to State Engineer Teresa Wilhelmsen.
That announcement came on May 7, after state officials received nearly 4,000 protests from Utahns against the application, citing concerns about the project’s impact on the nearby Great Salt Lake, the statewide drought, its environmental effects and the lack of details about the data center’s construction plans.
But Gleich and others opposing the Stratos Project say that withdrawing the current application may just be a strategic ploy to benefit from new legislation scheduled to go into effect on May 12.
The environmentalist and skier believes that Canadian millionaire investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame didn’t withdraw his state water application after listening to Utahns’ concerns about the Stratos Project, but rather to dodge accountability because after May 12 the state engineer won’t be allowed to consider issues like “public interest” and “more beneficial use” in evaluating that request.
“That’s the playbook,” Gleich predicts. “Lose the round. Change the rules. Come back stronger.”
That view is shared by many of the advocacy groups opposing the proposed massive 40,000-acre data center campus in Box Elder County, including Grow with the Flow, the Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others.
House Bill 60 (Water Rights Amendment), which was passed by the Utah Legislature in its most recent session, modifies the conditions under which the state engineer may consider a protest to a water rights application and the grounds for approval or rejection.
Under the new law that goes into effect next week, state officials are only allowed to consider issues directly related to the beneficial use of or the quantity, quality or availability of water in question.
The Water Right Amendment legislation expressly prohibits the state engineer from using public welfare as a basis for rejection of a water application if any regulation or mitigation of the detrimental impact is better addressed by another state agency.
The provisions of that new law would seemingly invalidate many of the nearly 4,000 protests filed with the state against the Stratos project this past week.
The development team behind the Stratos project have already announced their intent to resubmit their water transfer application in a timely manner with additional supporting information to further demonstrate the feasibility of the project, according to Paul Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital.