Tooele Inland Ports
A Data Center on the Shore of Great Salt Lake
A UIPA-backed industrial development in Tooele Valley is seeking a state permit to discharge concentrated brine from a reverse osmosis water treatment plant directly into protected shoreline wetlands — just 1.6 miles from Great Salt Lake. The project, enabled by over $234 million in taxpayer subsidies, would release wastewater with no enforceable limits on salt, chloride, or arsenic into wetlands that flow directly into Gilbert Bay.
The aquifer serving this area has been closed since 1996 and is already failing nearby communities. Utah is in 100% drought with record-low snowpack. Great Salt Lake is still recovering from its historic low. This is the wrong place, and the wrong moment, to permit unregulated industrial brine discharge into one of the lake's most sensitive ecosystems.
Governor Cox signed an Executive Order requiring that data center development protect Great Salt Lake. Permit UT0026409 is a test of that commitment. The Utah Division of Water Quality is accepting public comments until July 27, 2026.
Utah’s Tooele Valley Public Infrastructure District (UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area) is channeling publicly subsidized infrastructure to serve a major industrial development—a 200-acre data center campus with a 500-megawatt on-site gas power plant, plus a diesel truck stop and hotel at Interstate 80. According to project documents and representations by developer Chuck Akerlow, this is the scale of what UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area is built to serve. The development draws water from a closed basin, and its reverse osmosis treatment system will discharge concentrated industrial brine directly into the wetland areas on the south shore of Great Salt Lake.
A draft Utah Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (UPDES) permit to allow this to move forward is out for public comment until July 27, also on July 27, at 6 pm, the Utah Division of Water Quality will hold a hearing on whether to approve the draft permit. You can show up in person or participate online.
THE WATER: AN ALREADY OVERDRAWN GROUNDWATER AQUIFER
The water problem here isn't only what goes out — it's what's already being pulled in. The Tooele Valley groundwater basin was formally declared over-appropriated by the State of Utah in 1996. That's a legal determination that more water rights already exist on paper than the aquifer can sustainably supply, even before this project.
The Tooele Valley Public Infrastructure District's well taps this same closed, over-appropriated basin. There is no surplus water in this system. Every new industrial withdrawal competes directly with existing users: Grantsville-area residents, farmers, and the wetlands downstream that depend on groundwater discharge to survive.
Federal science backs this up. A 2009 USGS model of the aquifer found that increased pumping would drop the water table by tens to hundreds of feet, and that drought conditions alone reduce annual aquifer recharge by roughly 18%. That study is now more than 15 years old — meaning it predates the current wave of industrial buildout entirely. Conditions have only tightened since.
The UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area holds rights to agricultural water in Tooele Valley, purchased from prior agricultural holders. Whether those rights were being actively consumed at the time of purchase is unknown. That uncertainty matters:
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If the rights were fallowed or unused, activating them for full industrial use in an already over-appropriated basin could represent genuinely new demand on the aquifer
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If they were actively used, converting seasonal irrigation to 24/7 industrial operation significantly increases the consumptive demand profile
Either way, no independent drawdown analysis has been filed with any regulator.
The public financing scaffolding built for this project includes:
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$54 million: UIPA tax increment financing, diverting property tax growth from local schools and services for 25 years
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$80 million: Tooele Valley PID tax-exempt bonds
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$100 million: Interstate Technology Park PID tax-exempt bonds
Total: $234 million in public subsidy for a single private development.
The first named tenant under the UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area: a Love’s Travel Stop—a diesel truck stop and hotel complex at the Burmester interchange on I-80. The Love’s site plan, reviewed by Tooele County Planning Commission on June 3, 2026, describes the project site as abutting wetlands.
THE DISCHARGE: BRINE INTO WETLAND-ADJACENT WATERS
The data center campus anchoring the UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area relies on reverse osmosis (RO) water treatment. The concentrated brine that RO systems reject does not disappear, it must go somewhere.
The draft UPDES Permit (UT0026409) would authorize:
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252,000 gallons per day of RO reject brine discharged to North Willow Creek and Gilbert Bay
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Zero dilution in the receiving water body
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No pre-discharge baseline water quality monitoring
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Arsenic present in the reject stream
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A beneficial use reclassification of the receiving water—done without public notice
The discharge would enter waters draining directly toward Gilbert Bay, into an actively monitored Intermountain West Shorebird Survey area on the south shore of Great Salt Lake.
UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area (left) and discharge route (red line) entering the Stansbury Mudflats shorebird survey area (green). Source: UPDES Permit UT0026409 outfall mapping overlaid with Intermountain West Shorebird Survey boundaries.
THE WETLANDS: WHAT THE SURVEY DATA SHOW
Shorebird counts from the Intermountain West Shorebird Survey document what is at stake. The wetlands adjacent to the UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area are not background habitat—they are mapped, counted primary use areas for species that have nowhere else to go.
The discharge goes directly into a monitored shorebird survey area.
UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area’s Outfall 001 does not discharge to a generic receiving water. Permit mapping overlaid with Intermountain West Shorebird Survey boundaries confirms the discharge route enters directly into the Stansbury Mudflats survey area—a named, actively monitored shorebird habitat on the south shore of Great Salt Lake. The Stansbury Mudflats North and South and Six-Mile Creek survey areas are the closest monitored sites to the Project Area footprint. The brine would not flow toward shorebird habitat. It would enter it.
What the Fall 2025 counts show:
The Intermountain West Shorebird Survey counted 274,104 shorebirds across 25 species in Utah in Fall 2025. "American Avocet, Wilson's Phalarope, and Red-necked Phalarope were among the most abundant species recorded. Survey areas adjacent to the I-80 corridor and the Love's Travel Stop site recorded documented shorebird use in the same survey period.
Wilson’s phalarope received a positive 90-day finding under the Endangered Species Act based in part on threats to Great Salt Lake wetland habitat. UDWR biologists have documented 80,000+ phalaropes now concentrated on the lake's western shoreline, in areas where none were observed thirty years ago—and the west-side mudflat system provides critical pre-migration staging habitat for a population that, at Great Salt Lake, has represented up to 60% of the global total.
Source: Intermountain West Shorebird Survey, Results for Utah in Fall 2025; GSL Issues Forum, May 7, 2026
A 30-year decline makes every remaining site irreplaceable:
Five years of survey data compared against 1989–1995 baselines show overall shorebird abundance has declined 37.4% in fall and 53.9% in spring across the Intermountain West. At Great Salt Lake specifically, the decline is statistically significant in both seasons, with most taxonomic groups down in the range of 58–69%.
The survey researchers found that about 75% of individuals use the same stopover locations consistently. That aggregation tendency amplifies rather than buffers exposure to environmental risk. Degrading the Stansbury Mudflats—where the discharge will go—does not push birds to equivalent habitat elsewhere. It removes a critical node in a system already under severe stress.
Source: Intermountain West Shorebird Survey / USU thesis research, GSL Issues Forum, May 7, 2026
East-side development makes west-side sites more critical:
As industrial development builds out along the lake’s eastern shore, the relatively undisturbed west-side mudflats carry increasing load. The Stansbury Mudflats sit between the Project Area footprint and the open waters of Gilbert Bay. Authorizing a brine discharge directly into this corridor—with no pre-discharge baseline and no completed antidegradation analysis—removes protection these birds have nowhere else to find.
THE SUBSIDY: $234 MILLION FOR A POLLUTING DEVELOPMENT
The $234 million in public financing is not going to schools, roads, or public services. It is financing the infrastructure that makes this development possible—roads, utilities, and water systems—for a project that developer Chuck Akerlow has described as a 200-acre data center campus with a 500-megawatt on-site gas power plant. The first named commercial tenant is a diesel truck stop and hotel complex whose own site plan describes the project as abutting wetlands.
The Love’s Travel Stop at Burmester—the first named UIPA Tooele Valley Project Area commercial tenant—is a direct beneficiary of this publicly financed infrastructure. Its own site plan describes the project as abutting wetlands. There has been no public vote, no independent environmental review of cumulative project impacts, and no binding commitment to protect the wetlands next door.
This is not economic development. It is the public financing of pollution—water, air, and land—in a landscape that cannot afford it.
Help stop the harm: submit a comment, attend the public hearing:
PUBLIC HEARING: UPDES Permit UT0026409
Monday, July 27, 2026
5:45 pm — Informational session
6:00 pm — Hearing begins
Multi-Agency State Office Building, 195 N 1950 W, Salt Lake City,
Board Room 1015
Join online: meet.google.com/mfd-hrau-eqn
Written comments also due July 27 (close of business)
Email: wqcomments@utah.gov | Reference: Permit UT0026409
Another Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA) boondoggle:
UIPA sponsored developer plans to build a wastewater treatment facility next to
Great Salt Lake to support industrial development
The state of Utah, through the Utah Inland Port Authority, is enabling rapid industrial development in Tooele County next to the shores of Great Salt Lake, and in the middle of 12,000 acres of high functioning Great Salt Lake biological wetlands. (See map from developers below.)
Below is a map of wetlands in the area. According to wetlands biologists, this portion of the Tooele Valley contains 12,000 acres of high functioning biological wetlands. These wetlands are in extreme jeopardy from destruction and degradation by this state subsidized industrial development, which includes building a wastewater treatment facility on the shores of Great Salt Lake.
What's happening with the proposed Tooele Valley Inland Port?
This subsidized industrial development - 2.45 million square feet of new warehouse development to start, is planned to contain 13 detention basins, a well, a water storage tank and a wastewater treatment facility and according to the developer, a 200 acre data center farm. These facilities, built with public subsidies will be owned by the developers and will be served by diesel truck and rail, adding to pollution in an area with serious air pollution and water quality issues. The public does not know how much water will be used, or where the water rights are coming from.
This area (particularly this part of the Tooele Valley) is already having problems with wells drying up or becoming too saline. What are the hydrological impacts of this type of development next to Great Salt Lake?
That and other questions have not been answered as this project is being rushed, for no other reason than to benefit the developers, Zenith Bolinder LLC.
Zenith Bolinder is owned by the father and uncle of Utah State Representative Bridger Bolinder and Charles “Chuck” Akerlow of Zenith Development. Akerlow spent a year in prison after pleading guilty to six misdemeanor counts of failure to pay $620,000 in federal excise tax on diesel fuel, money that was unrecoverable because the corporation was defunct.
The Tooele Valley project would not be happening without Utah Inland Port Authority subsidies and financial tools.
Public records show that Zenith Bolinder failed to pay $62,840 in Tooele County property taxes in 2023. They were also unable to get a traditional bank loan to move their project forward, so UIPA gave Zenith Bolinder a one-year loan of $4.875 million at 3.47%.
Now under the umbrella of UIPA, and a “public infrastructure district” that UIPA helped them create, they are proposing to sell approximately $100 million in UIPA sponsored tax-exempt junk bonds to pay for their infrastructure to support industrial development. The interest rate on this publicly subsidized borrowing is allowed to be as high as 12-13%, resulting in the total cost of borrowing being in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. And, they are planning to sell these bonds at a time when interest rates are still high.
This, when the public hasn’t been fully informed of the consequences of this kind of development so close to Great Salt Lake.
Background
The Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA) created 2 Inland Port Project Areas in Tooele County and they're providing significant tax breaks and other tax payer funded financial help to industrial developers (the Romney Group and Zenith Bollinder LLC). As a Port Authority staffer said to the Grantsville City Council, it will result in "fast tracking growth in your community."(Grantsville City Council meeting Sept. 6, 2023 at 9:36)
Both proposed project areas are seeking a rail connection to their development built by Savage Tooele Rail a subsidiary of Savage Services. They have been seeking approval to rebuild an old rail line that connects to the property from the mainline of the Union Pacific. The old rail line also connects to the proposed Tooele Inland Port Project Area.
Two of the developers seeking to make a profit from industrial development in Tooele County have relatives who are elected officials - State Representative Bridger Bolinder, and Josh Romney, son of US Senator Mitt Romney.
No business case for why the proposed Tooele County Inland Ports should be subsidized by the taxpayers has been presented to the taxpayers.
If built, the proposed Tooele Inland Port would destroy high functioning wetlands and put more pressure on the dying Great Salt Lake. It would damage air quality, increase traffic congestion, destroy roads and create danger from heavy trucks. In short it would destroy quality of life in Tooele County. Taxpayer money should not be used to benefit a few developers at the expense of public health.
Not only would residents of Tooele County be hurt by this, but so would people throughout northern Utah who would suffer from the degradation of our air shed, destruction of critical wildlife habitat increasing the stress on migratory birds, and increased polluting and dangerous truck traffic.