Stop the Stratos Project and Regulate Data Center Exploitation of Public Resources

Block the Stratos Project and stop letting data corporations raid public resources for private profit. The Great Salt Lake is already 6 feet below a healthy level, our region is in active drought, and locals have been asked to conserve water — yet MIDA, O'Leary Digital, and West GenCo want to convert water rights from domestic use to industrial cooling for a $100 billion data center. A physics professor at Utah State University calculated this facility would dump the equivalent of 23 atom bombs worth of energy into the local environment every single day, potentially raising nighttime temperatures by 28°F. This is not development. It's extraction. History is clear: unregulated, extractive industry does not self-correct. Maine paused new large-scale data centers for 18 months. A Wisconsin city passed the first anti-data center referendum. Utah should be leading, not lagging. The Box Elder Accountability Referendum group and hundreds of protesters are already sounding the alarm — only 2% of community comments supported this project. That's not opposition to progress; that's a community protecting its water, its land, and its future. Water and power are finite public resources, not corporate inputs. Push for statewide legislation requiring full environmental review, mandatory public water plans, and real tax accountability before any data center of this scale breaks ground anywhere in Utah.