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| Find out more at the source https://www.stopthepollutingport.org/proposed-tooele-inland-port |
It's been a brutal few weeks for Utah. The state is in a declared drought emergency after the warmest winter and lowest snowpack on record, wildfires have burned more than 357,000 acres statewide, and on July 8 a dust plume off the Great Salt Lake pushed Wasatch Front air quality to hazardous levels, carrying arsenic and other metals from the exposed lakebed.
This is what a drying Great Salt Lake looks like. It's the backdrop for a permit decision that would add more industrial demand on a closed water basin and more pollution headed toward the wetlands the lake has left.
Please join us at a public hearing in two weeks that determines whether this damaging development will move forward.
The Utah Division of Water Quality has scheduled a hearing on a proposed permit that would authorize 252,000 gallons per day of industrial brine discharge—reject water from a reverse osmosis system serving a data center campus in Tooele Valley—into wetlands that drain directly to Great Salt Lake.
The discharge route enters an actively monitored Intermountain West Shorebird Survey area on the south shore of Great Salt Lake.
This industrial development is being made possible through public financing provided by the Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA), which is modeled after the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA).
PUBLIC HEARING: UPDESPermit UT0026409
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Here's what you can do:
Come to the hearing, in person or online. Showing up builds the public record and sends a signal about who is paying attention.
To speak, sign in when you arrive. Two minutes is enough. Say you oppose the permit, name the wetlands and the birds, the cumulative impacts that this enables and ask DWQ to deny or substantially revise it.
Send a written comment by July 27. Email wqcomments@utah.gov, reference permit UT0026409. A sentence or two is fine. Your words matter more than you think.
Why this permit is a problem:
The brine discharge contains arsenic and will enter Class 5E transitional wetlands with zero dilution
DWQ reclassified the receiving water without public notice
No pre-discharge baseline monitoring has been conducted
The full antidegradation analysis is incomplete
No air quality permit has been filed for the 500-megawatt gas power plant that would serve the data center campus
Bottom line: The Utah Division of Water Quality should not finalize this permit until the cumulative impacts, downstream protections, and real-world testing have occurred.
This is $234 million in public subsidy, UIPA tax increment financing plus tax-exempt bonds through two Public Infrastructure Districts, going to a development that begins with a diesel truck stop next to a shorebird wetland and ends with a gas-fired data center the size of a small power plant.
The hearing is the public’s opportunity to put that on the record. Please join us!
For more info go here.
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by July 27th, 5 pm.
Subject line: Permit UT0026409
I am voter in Utah and I live downwind of cancer-causing dust created by the man-made desiccation of the Great Salt Lake.
I oppose the permit for wastewater related to another data center because it pollutes wetlands vital to the Great Salt Lake.
Please make public meeting all over the state.
Do not allow this approval which is in violation of gov cox order.
Tooele is already short of water so allowing a project that worsens this situation must be illegal. Do not approve it.
As a taxpayers I object to my money being used to poison our wetlands and the GSL. That must be illegal.
I know what data centers do and it is at least half bad stuff that citizens don’t want. Surveillance and marketing uses up 50-60% of computations . Therefore I object to voter-hostile GOP legislature forcing data centers on an unwilling state, on unwilling local residents, using our money and at huge loss to our lake.
I share two letters I wrote to gov cox and Utah lawmakers as well.
**Block Data Center Permits and Investigate Port Authority and MIDA for Possible Fraud**
Reject any permits for data center wastewater dumping in our state, and launch a full investigation into the Port Authority and MIDA for possible fraud against Utah taxpayers. These agencies have operated without accountability for too long, and the damage to our communities and public trust demands more than oversight — it demands consequences.
Data centers are not a neutral economic development tool. They consume enormous amounts of water and energy, and permitting them to dump wastewater, heat, air pollution, toxic waste or consume water of great salt lake basin is an unacceptable cost to impose on Utah residents.
The Port Authority and MIDA have promoted these extremely harmful arrangements while misrepresenting the public benefit, shirking public accountability, by-passing slews of laws, local codes, oversight.
The public is already facing serious losses in their property values, health, and businesses from the man-made crisis at the Great Salt Lake.
Class action lawsuits against the responsible parties in the Utah legislature, MIDA, inland Port authority, the executive branch are surely in the works and I intended to join such a suit. EPA will take state power away soon as air pollution worsens.
Disband both agencies. Claw back any misspent public funds. Utah taxpayers deserve representatives, agencies, and who will fight for them, not rubber-stamp deals that benefit developers at the grave and great public's expense.
**Block Water Permits and Development for UIPA and MIDA Projects**
Block all water permits and halt approvals for any development tied to the Utah Inland Port Authority or MIDA. These entities were created through significant legislative overreach, and a lawsuit now argues that m MIDA’s and UIPA's board are unconstitutionally structured — with unacceptable lack of public oversight and “taking” of lands from local authorities.
That arrangement strips voters of any meaningful accountability over decisions that directly affect our property, our health, the environment, and our tax dollars. This cannot be legal.
Actions and structure of UIPA and MIDA are ethically and morally despicable.
The port authority has already approved industrial projects near wetlands, agricultural land, and open space across the Great Salt Lake Basin. The Center for Biological Diversity calls this "fast-tracking industrial development throughout Utah" — and they're right.
The Great Salt Lake cannot absorb more industrial encroachment while it is already in crisis. These quasi-public workarounds were designed to bypass the oversight that protects communities like mine, and they should not receive a single permit or approval.
Utahns spoke clearly at the ballot box on June 23, 2026. We voted out 3 lawmakers who ignored our best interests, who promote data centers and promoted development at our expense. We voted out two others who regularly promoted their own interests at our expense.
Please listen to voters and enact statewide moratoriums on all such projects, permits, and development.
Disband the Inland Port Authority and MIDA asap.
Please deny all permits from these two entities.
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