"Not the Landowner, Not the Developer"

UIPA's Tooele Valley Project Area sits on the Great Salt Lake's southern shore, near the shoreline of Gilbert Bay. Inside it: a planned 500-megawatt data center, a Love's Travel Stop, a hotel, and warehouses, developed by Zenith Development under Charles "Chuck" Akerlow. A separate government entity, the Tooele Valley Public Infrastructure District, has already issued $33 million in bonds to build the roads, water, and sewer serving the site.

Two Accounts of the Same Project

UIPA's own public statement — "UIPA's Position on Data Centers: Transparent Growth, Local Control and Natural Resource Protection" — draws a careful line around its own role. The authority says its involvement has focused only on transportation infrastructure within a 600-acre northern portion of the project area, separate from the data center itself, which sits in the project's southern section. UIPA Executive Director Ben Hart made this same distinction directly to reporters, though he acknowledged the wastewater treatment plant serving the site may end up serving both portions.

The developer has described the relationship differently.

A Third Account: UIPA's Own Project Page

UIPA's own official page for the Tooele Valley Project Area — the page any member of the public would find first — describes it in purely generic industrial terms: 584 acres in northern Tooele County, connected via Burmester Road and Interstate 80, with rail adjacency creating "a unique opportunity for industrial growth." The page lists the project's milestones (Resolution, Initial Presentation, Board Approval, PID Created, Amendment, Successes) and links to the official Project Area Plan and Annual Report. Nowhere on that page, in any of its own project description or milestone list, does the word "data center" appear.

The project area's origin is dated precisely: the Tooele County Council passed a resolution on April 11, 2023, consenting to and requesting that UIPA establish a project area within county boundaries. Just under six months later, on October 4, 2023, the Tooele Valley Project Area draft was presented to the UIPA board for the first time at a public board meeting — the second of the six milestones on UIPA's own project page. UIPA's own listed contact for the project is Stephanie Pack, Associate Vice President for Regional Project Area Development.

The Live Fight: What Goes Into the Water

The site's groundwater is brackish, so the developer plans a reverse osmosis treatment plant — and is seeking a state permit to discharge up to 252,000 gallons a day of the resulting concentrated brine into a drainage channel running through transitional wetlands, and from there into Gilbert Bay itself. A Utah Division of Water Quality public hearing on the permit, held July 27, 2026, drew heavy opposition; only two people spoke in favor, one of them a real estate attorney specializing in water issues. No decision had been reached as of that hearing.

Opponents raised concerns about PFAS contamination, diesel runoff, toxic dust from the shrinking lakebed, and the absence of enforceable limits on salt, chloride, or arsenic in the proposed discharge. The aquifer supplying the project has reportedly been closed to new appropriation since 1996.

A Second, Larger Version of the Same Fight

The Tooele Valley project isn't the only Great Salt Lake data center controversy playing out through a quasi-government authority. The Stratos Project — roughly 20,000 acres on the lake's north shore, backed not by UIPA but by the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) — is a separate, much larger version of the same basic pattern: a state land-use authority approves a massive data center project, and the surrounding community raises the same water and environmental concerns after the fact.

What's Confirmed, What Isn't