Utah Residents Sue to Block O’Leary’s Stratos Data Center

Box Elder County residents and Alliance for a Better Utah, a progressive nonprofit, filed a lawsuit in Utah’s 3rd District Court last Wednesday, making 10 constitutional claims against the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), the unelected state body that approved Kevin O’Leary’s Stratos Project data center campus in April. Attorney David Irvine, representing the plaintiffs, argues that MIDA exercises power over public health, taxation, and tens of thousands of acres of county land that “the Utah Constitution never authorized.”

The filing arrives as O’Leary has agreed to cut the proposed campus from 40,000 to 20,000 acres under mounting political pressure, and as a separate citizen group pursues a parallel referendum challenge in a second Utah court.

Ten Claims Against an Unelected Board

The complaint was filed by Irvine on behalf of the Alliance for a Better Utah and five Box Elder County residents who kept their names out of the filing. Several of those residents also belong to the Box Elder Accountability Referendum (BEAR) group, which has been pursuing its own court challenge since May.

The lawsuit names four defendants: MIDA, the Box Elder County Commission, Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, and state Sen. Jerry Stevenson. Both lawmakers sit on the MIDA board while simultaneously serving in the Utah Legislature, and the complaint argues that arrangement violates the Utah Constitution’s prohibition on legislators holding multiple offices of public trust.

Remedies the plaintiffs are asking the court to grant:

• Declare all actions by MIDA and the county commission unconstitutional and null and void
• Issue a permanent injunction preventing any further implementation of the Stratos Project Area Plan
• Remove Adams and Stevenson from the MIDA board as unconstitutional appointees
• Order Adams to return $135,000 in PAC contributions received from MIDA-connected entities after chairing the project’s approval
• Block Box Elder County from re-entering any new agreement with MIDA on the campus

“Backroom deals and pay-to-play have no place in Utah government,” Irvine said in a statement, “and Box Elder County residents deserve a voice in what happens to their community.” MIDA’s spokesperson said the authority is reviewing the lawsuit. Box Elder County public information officer Lynnette Crockett told NBC News that officials had not been formally served.

MIDA’s Path From Military Airbase to Statewide Authority

MIDA didn’t start as a land developer for AI campuses. MIDA’s official account of its founding and mission traces its creation to a 2007 act of the Utah Legislature, built around one federal program: the Enhanced Use Lease (EUL), which allowed military installations to partner with private developers on underutilized parcels. The catalyst was Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah, which had survived multiple rounds of base-closure threats in the 1990s. State officials wanted a single coordinating authority to manage the intergovernmental complexity of developing military land.

Over nearly two decades, the authority’s statutory powers expanded through successive legislative sessions, according to the Transparent Utah MIDA accountability dashboard released last week by Utah State Auditor Tina Cannon. Cannon called MIDA a “super” special district, with city-like authority to issue bonds, levy taxes, control land use, and capture tax increment within its project areas. Sen. Stevenson told a state legislative panel in 2024 that “anything that a city can do, MIDA could do.” Its governing board has no electoral check on who serves.

• $2.8 billion in assets accumulated by MIDA since 2007, per the Transparent Utah dashboard
• $836 million spent on development across MIDA project areas through 2026
• $1.5 billion in additional property tax value attributed to MIDA projects statewide

Cannon’s office built the dashboard after being flooded with requests for more information about MIDA from the public. “Obviously this has been a very hot topic for the state of Utah,” she told Utah News Dispatch. The statutory inventory on the dashboard documents how MIDA’s powers grew through multiple legislative sessions, adding capabilities in land use, taxation, infrastructure financing, and public-private partnerships that went well beyond managing military runways.

Prior projects include the Falcon Hill Aerospace Research Park near Hill Air Force Base and a recreational resort expansion at Deer Valley in Wasatch County, which occupies 14.5 acres. Cannon’s office found that MIDA’s enabling statute no longer restricts the authority to projects with a direct military connection, meaning future AI data center developments could also be processed through its structure, however commercially motivated the underlying project might be.

The Fast Track From January to May

The approval of the Stratos campus moved through Utah’s governmental structure with little public notice until the moment the county voted.

Paul Morris, MIDA’s executive director, told Box Elder County commissioners in April that the campus qualified for MIDA oversight because hyperscale data center capacity supports national security functions, per MIDA’s published goals for the Stratos project area. As originally proposed, the campus would have consumed up to 9 gigawatts of electricity, more than double Utah’s total current statewide consumption, and covered approximately 62 square miles, an area comparable in size to Washington, D.C.

Many Box Elder County residents said they had no meaningful opportunity to weigh in before the deal was done. Thousands showed up to the May 4 commission meeting in protest, enough that the three-member panel left the main chamber to avoid the disruption before casting its votes. By then, the county’s consent was already one signature away from being legally permanent.

Adams, Stevenson, and the Dual-Office Argument

Adams chairs the MIDA board while simultaneously serving as president of the Utah Senate, the chamber whose members appointed him to that very board. Stevenson, a Republican from Layton, has sat on the MIDA board since the authority’s founding, alongside his legislative duties. The complaint argues both appointments violate the Utah Constitution’s prohibition on legislators simultaneously holding another office of public trust. That argument, if the court accepts it, would retroactively invalidate every vote either lawmaker cast on the MIDA board.

Adams and Stevenson, by working simultaneously on MIDA’s Board and in the state legislature, are serving multiple masters with distinct, often clashing, interests.

That language comes from the complaint filed in Utah’s 3rd District Court. If the court agrees, the April 24 Stratos approval would be declared illegal, invalid, null, and void.

On top of the dual-office argument, the complaint targets the $135,000 that flowed into his PAC on a single day in May. Per the Alliance for a Better Utah’s call for a Senate Ethics investigation into Adams, five entities with active MIDA-connected projects deposited those funds on May 1, 2026, seven days after the board vote approving the campus. The five checks were the largest individual contributions in the PAC’s six-year history and together nearly doubled its existing cash on hand. None of the five donors appears directly tied to the O’Leary deal; all five have separate projects operating under MIDA’s authority.

Adams’ response has been brief. “Campaign and PAC contributions are disclosed and are entirely separate from any policy decisions,” he told Utah News Dispatch. The lawsuit asks the court to order him to disgorge the full $135,000. He’s also fighting for his political life in what is his first-ever contested primary, facing Republican challengers Stephanie Hollist and Braden Hess as he seeks a fifth Senate term.

BEAR’s Referendum and the Irrevocability Problem

The Alliance for a Better Utah filed its constitutional complaint on June 4, one day after BEAR filed a referendum appeal in a separate court. BEAR’s track began on May 11, when the group submitted two referendum applications asking Box Elder County to allow voters to decide whether to reverse the commission’s approval. To move forward, the group needed 5,422 signatures from registered county voters within 45 days of any approval being granted.

County Attorney Hadfield rejected those applications on May 28, concluding the resolutions passed on May 4 were administrative acts, not legislative ones, and therefore blocked from going to a referendum under Utah law. BEAR’s attorneys argue the opposite: that decisions permanently reshaping land use, taxation, and environmental governance in a rural county of 65,000 people carry the force of law. Brigham Daniels, a University of Utah law professor who analyzed the dispute at a public panel, said the referendum right “may turn on whether the decision by Box Elder County commissioners was an administrative or legislative move.” BEAR appealed to the 1st District Court on June 3.

The irrevocable consent clause runs through both challenges. That provision, once triggered by a county’s interlocal agreement with MIDA, makes the county’s approval permanent and cuts off residents’ ability to seek a referendum. It is this provision the Alliance for a Better Utah lawsuit attacks most directly, arguing the legislature cannot use a statute to permanently extinguish citizens’ pre-existing rights to referendum. The complaint calls the provision “a substantial invasion of the rights of Box Elder County residents to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

State Auditor Cannon, who has no direct audit authority over MIDA but built the transparency dashboard in response to public demand, noted one legislative remedy. “What has been created by the legislature can be modified by the legislature,” she told reporters. “They can change this.”

O’Leary Cuts the Campus in Half

Under an agreement announced Thursday, the campus footprint drops from 40,000 to 20,000 acres, with additional commitments to reserve thousands of acres for open space and wildlife protection. The Senate president had sent O’Leary a public letter demanding a 75% reduction in the project’s acreage. The celebrity investor initially refused, then conceded to the 50% cut. He told The Salt Lake Tribune the project won’t be “the largest data center in the world.” “That’s off the table,” he said. On why the Senate president reversed his previous full-throated support, O’Leary was blunt: “He did this for political reasons. He had to answer to all these people.” Gov. Spencer Cox had already issued an executive order in late May requiring “careful consideration” of data centers’ environmental impacts, a signal of how completely the political climate around the project had shifted.

The scale-back does not automatically resolve the constitutional questions now before two Utah courts. The Alliance for a Better Utah lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction against the campus as currently approved, and a ruling on MIDA’s constitutionality would reach well beyond this one site. Cannon put the broader remedy plainly: the legislature that expanded MIDA’s powers across 19 years can narrow them. Two district courts are now pressing that question faster than the legislature has moved.