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Utah has finalized its deal with the private equity group Otro Capital, the Utes announced Friday.

The announcement has been in the works for months; the school’s board of trustees approved the general idea in December. But Friday’s announcement officially makes Utah the first athletic department in college sports to team up with private equity.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Utah officials have touted a nine-figure impact to the program. Athletic director Mark Harlan called it a “really innovative solution that could carry the University of Utah into the future in a really productive manner.”

The deal includes the formation of a new entity, Crimson Brand Partners, that is intended to modernize and streamline the Utes’ 19 sports. Former New Orleans Saints and Cleveland Browns executive Matt Webb will serve as the entity’s CEO. Harlan will chair its board.

When it launches July 1 at the start of the fiscal year, Crimson Brand Partners will handle the commercial aspects of Utah sports like ticketing, branding and sponsorships. The Utes will retain control of issues like fundraising, coaching, recruiting and scheduling.

Although Otro — an investment group with a portfolio that includes Alpine’s Formula 1 racing team — will have a stake in Crimson Brand Partners, the company will make annual reports to the university’s board of trustees and foundation.

“There’s no road map,” Webb said. “We’re certainly building the plane as we’re flying.”

The reasons for embracing private equity outlined Friday were largely the same as they were in December when Utah made its first public steps to this deal. The Utes are in a Power 4 conference (the Big 12) but are not a financial juggernaut like Ohio State or Georgia. That puts Utah in a tough position as it competes at the national level against bigger, richer programs. Instead of pursuing more money from the academic side or cutting sports, the Utes decided outside investors could allow their athletics to keep competing at a high level.

Questions and concerns arose as terms were being finalized. A letter from the state auditor to the board of trustees last month raised “significant risks” about the deal unless the Utes slash spending or spike revenue. Utah athletics reported $4.69 million more in revenue than expenses in 2025, but only after, auditor Tina Cannon said, using $19.4 million in reserves.

“There is a profound risk that financial gains and investor returns may be prioritized over long-term and long-held institutional values,” the letter from Cannon said.

In a news conference Friday, Harlan said he was “very comfortable” with the governance structure and steps the Utes have taken to protect themselves financially. Harlan said inaction also brings uncertainty.

“I would argue there’s more risks of not doing anything based on the climate we’re in and the rising costs,” Harlan said.

Private equity has been circling around college sports outside Utah, too. In April, the Big 12 closed on a deal with a venture from RedBird and Weatherford Capital that will provide at least $12.5 million to the conference as the start of a broader partnership. Other schools, including Florida State, have also considered private equity.

Utah’s deal comes in the wake of the athletic department clearly searching for more significant revenue streams.

This week, the Salt Lake Tribune obtained detailed documents from a consulting firm Utah hired to review the university’s athletic department operations in 2024. Employees were granted anonymity during the firm’s interview process, and among the chief concerns were tickets to games given away for free, an inadequate  game-day experience and employee burnout.

According to the report from the Tribune, employees from various departments said they had inconsistent communication with the department’s leadership.

“It’s just week-to-week survival,” said one employee in the report.

In the year since the report, Utah had a ticket revenue increase of $3.3 million from football, men’s basketball and gymnastics.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney became a symbol of middle power resistance after a celebrated speech earlier this year, but he is expected to be more muted in his criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump at an upcoming summit in Europe. Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, helped make him an international political star in January, when he declared the global rules-based order over and condemned coercion by great powers on smaller countries. The prime minister received widespread praise and attention for his remarks and upstaged Trump at the gathering.

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TOOELE, Utah (ABC4) — A Utah man has been arrested in connection with multiple Tooele County wildfires.

Timothy West, 39, has been arrested on three counts of arson (second-degree felony), one count of causing a catastrophe (Class A misdemeanor), and one count of damaging a jail (third-degree felony).

According to the Tooele County Sheriff’s Office, the arrest comes after two fires were reported in Tooele County on June 10, one in the Lake Point area and the other in Stockton.

The Stockton Fire Department, which is made up completely of volunteer firefighters, evacuated several residents, including Diann Hickman. Hickman said, “There were tall flames. They looked like they were right behind our house, but they were actually just to the side.”

She continued, “If they would have been here five, ten minutes later, we wouldn’t have a house.”

“The fire department got here, they attacked it, they put it out, I don’t want to say record time, but they did a very fast job of putting out the flames,” added Stockton Mayor Joe Johnston.

Unfortunately, while these fires were put out quickly, the concern over wildfires remains high. Utah Fire Info reports that there have been 239 fires this year and 204 of those have been human caused.

The sentiment is especially felt in Stockton, after the South Mountain Fire burned over 1800 acres just a few miles away. Johnson stated, “I cringe every time I walk out the front door at my house every day. I’m like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ It’s a tinder box out here.”

With high fire danger, fire officials are asking Utah residents to do what they can to prevent fires. Karl Hunt, with Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands, stated “Prevention is the key to fighting wildfire. It’s easier to prevent a wildfire than it is to fight a wildfire.”

“We have a town ordinance where if your weeds are a certain height, they need to be below ten inches. That needs to be taken care of,” added Johnston. “There are a lot of residents in this town that have not really accomplished that yet and they need to mitigate any potential fire risk that could happen.”

Ongoing investigation

As for the Lake Point and Stockton fires, the investigation is ongoing. However, witness statements, surveillance footage, and vehicle descriptions placed Timothy West on scene of both. While he reportedly knocked on doors to notify residents of the fire, he did not live in or near the area, did not appear to have a reason to be there, and had previous arson convictions.

Due to the circumstances, West was booked into the Tooele County Jail.

During the process of transporting him to the booking area, he stated he would “rather die than go to prison,” and said “it was strike three”, indicating he knew the fires were arson and had been involved. While being booked into jail, officers found a soot-like substance on West’s boots.

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Court records show that West has a history of arson, with prior convictions in 2010 and 2014. In 2010, he plead guilty to arson and causing a catastrophe. In 2014, West plead guilty to two counts of arson.

The 2014 fire was on the East Mountain in north Stockton. Damages exceeded $5,000 in value. There are no further details on the 2010 conviction.

The sheriff’s office is requesting residents and businesses in Stockton to review any surveillance or security camera footage and report any suspicious activity or relevant information relatd to this fire to Tooele County Dispatch at (435) 882-5600.

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Utah is suffering from such dry conditions that a group of kids with a lighter and a squirrel managed to start separate brush fires within hours, according to local media reports.

The ongoing severe drought in Utah has created the perfect conditions for destructive fires, prompting officials to warn that this year’s fire season could be particularly severe. Those concerns were highlighted Tuesday after firefighters battled two separate blazes in northern Utah.

A squirrel tangled in a power line managed to spark a half-acre brush fire Tuesday morning in Layton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, according to local outlet FOX 13. Later that day, a group of children reportedly started a brush fire that burned an acre in Saratoga Springs, a city on the northwestern shore of Utah Lake. Media reports indicated they were playing with matches, but the Saratoga Springs Fire Department later confirmed it was a lighter.

Both fires were extinguished, and it appears no one was injured, according to FOX 13. The Independent has requested more information from fire officials in Layton and Saratoga Springs.

This comes as firefighters battle multiple major blazes throughout the state.

The South Mountain Fire in northwestern Utah has burned through more than 1,800 acres and was at 40 percent containment as of Wednesday morning. The Tower Fire, which is burning near the small town of Scipio in central Utah, is currently 34 percent contained after spreading to more than 1,300 acres.

Utah fire officials have warned the ongoing drought, combined with warmer temperatures and low snowfall earlier this year, led to lots of dry vegetation that could serve as fuel for destructive fires.

“This year’s conditions, even more than recent years, are raising concern,” Salt Lake City Fire Chief Karl Lieb said at a press conference last month.

“If we all take this seriously now, our agencies and the public together, we can reduce the number of fires, limit how fast they spread, and better protect the communities we all care about,” Unified Fire Chief Dominic Burchett added.

Officials are asking residents to take steps to prevent wildfires, such as refraining from starting campfires on windy days and exercising caution when shooting outdoors.

“We identify target shooting as one of the behaviors that contribute to human-caused wildfires in the state,” a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and Estate Lands told ABC 4 this week.

Last year, fires burned more than 165,000 acres in Utah, which cost the state more than $191 million, according to KSL News. Still, firefighters managed to keep 92 percent of those fires under 10 acres.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity has promised a bloodbath for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. To head off that debacle, party leaders in red states have set off an arms race of political gerrymandering. They’ve made an unprecedented move to redistrict their states before the next census to create new, safe GOP districts that might allow the party to preserve its control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Blue states like California have responded in kind.

Amid that political tug-of-war, one red state will be holding its first non-gerrymandered congressional election of the 21^st century: Utah, which Donald Trump won in 2024 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

The change has been a long time in the making. Voters first approved Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative in 2018. But Republicans in the state legislature, with support from the governor, have gone to extreme lengths to prevent it from going into effect. After eight years of bitter legal battles, Utah courts finally forced the state to follow the law and adopt fair voting districts that will be in effect for the first time this year. As a result, a Democrat has a real shot at winning one of the state’s four congressional seats—an outcome that could help swing control of Congress in November.

The mere possibility of Utah voters sending a single Democrat to Congress has sparked a fierce and desperately devious backlash from state Republicans hell-bent on making sure such an outcome never happens again. Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, says, “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

Despite its reputation as a hard-core conservative state, Utah has sent several Democrats to Congress in the past. In 1992, the state even elected a Democratic woman, Karen Shepherd, who served a single term before she was ousted two years later by the scandal-plagued Enid Waldholtz.

Back then, the state had only three congressional districts, and one of them was mostly limited to Salt Lake City and its suburbs, the state’s largest population center. In 2000, that district elected Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog Democrat whose father, Scott Matheson, was the last Utah Democrat elected to serve as governor in 1980.

But as the GOP nationally grew more radical, Utah Republicans who couldn’t beat Matheson at the ballot box tried to redistrict him out of office. In 2002, they changed his district boundaries to break up Salt Lake City and staple it to rural areas like Vernal or the fast-growing conservative area in Southern Utah, eight hours away.

Much to their chagrin, Matheson continued to win elections, even after the legislature split Salt Lake County into four different districts in 2010. In 2014, he gave up and retired after 14 years. But his district remained somewhat competitive. The late Republican Mia Love won the seat that year but lost it in 2018 to former Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams, who served one term before losing to former NFL player and Fox News commentator Burgess Owens in 2020. In 2020, the state legislature redrew the maps again to ensure that no Democrat could ever be elected to Congress.

The Utah state legislature has been able to do this because Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority, even though the state’s demographics have changed dramatically. The legislature is also more than 80 percent male, nearly 90 percent Mormon, and 98 percent white. Yet Utah is now about 16 percent Latino, only about 60 percent LDS, and increasingly liberal. Brigham Young University professor Jacob Rugh has calculated that since 2004, Utah has swung left more than any other state in the country—by about 24 points. Even Provo, home of BYU, where Mitt Romney won about 85 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential election, gave Trump only 56 percent of its vote in 2024.

Salt Lake City has become so liberal that democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the Democratic presidential primaries there in 2016 and again in 2020. Kamala Harris beat Trump in Salt Lake by 23 points even as she lost the rest of the state by more than 20. Yet none of those shifts are reflected in the state’s congressional delegation, which is currently made up entirely of white Republican men.

In 2018, Utah voters tried to change all that when they approved a ballot initiative to require an independent redistricting commission to draw nonpartisan maps. The measure also banned the state legislature from unfairly advantaging one party in redistricting. Almost as soon as Prop. 4 passed, the state legislature moved to repeal it, and in 2021, the legislature once again cracked Salt Lake into four GOP-dominant districts.

The next year, eight groups, including the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued the legislature, arguing that the repeal of Prop. 4 violated the state constitution. In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in their favor and sent the case back to the trial court for more litigation over the maps. In response, the legislature tried unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution to ban citizen-initiated ballot initiatives.

Finally, in August last year, Judge Diana Gibson ruled that the legislature had violated the state constitution and gave it a month to come up with new maps that complied with the law in time for the 2026 election. The ruling ignited a national firestorm on the right. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump said on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”

Instead of following the judge’s order, the legislature once again drew partisan district maps; Gibson once again threw them out. She ruled that the 2026 election would be governed by the nonpartisan maps created by the independent redistricting commission. Rather than accept the ruling, members of the state legislature immediately moved to impeach Gibson, who received death threats, along with many court employees. They also appealed her decision, with support from Republican Gov. Spencer Cox.

“The Utah Constitution clearly states that it is the responsibility of the Legislature to divide the state into congressional districts,” Cox wrote on social media. “While I respect the Court’s role in our system, no judge, and certainly no advocacy group, can usurp that constitutional authority. For this reason, I fully support the Legislature appealing the Court’s decision.”

The Washington County commission, in southern Utah, even voted in January to ignore Gibson’s order entirely, despite being advised by their own lawyer that they would be out of compliance with state law. “I think she’s guilty of criminal conspiracy for conspiring with democratic socialists, and with outside money to try to flip a district in a state and basically control Congress,” fumed Commissioner Victor Iverson, calling Gibson “that lady who shouldn’t even be on the bench.”

In February, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously rejected the legislature’s appeal, but it didn’t result in a ceasefire. In December, the head of the state GOP and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had started a group called Utahns for Representative Government to repeal Prop. 4 through a ballot initiative.

The enterprise was run by a dark money group aligned with Trump that, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, funneled more than $4 million into the campaign and helped bring in out-of-state workers to gather petitions needed to get the measure on the ballot. It generated a host of complaints from people who alleged that they’d been tricked into signing it, thinking they were actually opposing gerrymandering. Good-government groups launched a grassroots effort to encourage people to withdraw their signatures if they felt they’d signed in error.

The measure failed to get on the ballot, and the election has proceeded. And now, for the moment, at least, the prospect of actually winning an election has invigorated the state’s long-moribund Democratic Party. Four candidates are currently on the primary ballot for the new 1^st congressional district, and the state even saw a televised debate among them last month—an event that hasn’t happened since 2010. “It’s definitely a win for the people of Utah to finally have something they voted for working,” says Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the bipartisan organization that spearheaded Prop. 4.

Former Rep. Ben McAdams looks poised to return to Congress. But Republicans seem committed to ensuring that even if he does get elected, he won’t serve another term. As state judges have repeatedly blocked Republicans’ campaign to undo Prop. 4, GOP officials have focused on undermining the independence of Utah courts.

“The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah, and they do not want to be politically accountable,” says Teneille Brown, a University of Utah law professor who helped found Co-Equal Utah, a nonprofit focused on protecting the state courts from political pressure. “Their relentless tactics are really evidence of why we really need better boundaries.”

Brown says Utah’s judges have historically been considered some of the best in the nation, largely because they have been selected on merit. A bipartisan judicial nominating commission was charged with identifying candidates for the governor to select from. But in 2023, the legislature removed the requirements for the commission to include Democrats and members recommended by the state bar. Now, the panel that selects appellate judges is entirely Republican, and includes members like Sen. Mike Lee’s nephew, who graduated from BYU law school in 2020, as well as the board chairman of the right-wing Sutherland Institute, a Utah think tank.

With that new system in place, Republicans have launched an attack on the judges who had decided the gerrymandering case. Utah holds retention elections for judges, and the GOP has actively urged voters to reject the Supreme Court judges who upheld the maps. They also instigated a particularly nasty smear campaign against Justice Diana Hagan.

Last year, Hagan had been involved in an ugly divorce, and her ex-husband had alleged to a friend that she had been having an affair with one of the lawyers who worked on the anti-gerrymandering litigation. Hagan was friends with the lawyer, but she had recused herself from any case in which he was involved. Nonetheless, her ex-husband’s friend, who has worked in the Trump administration, filed a complaint against Hagan with the Judicial Conduct Commission.

Hagan vehemently denied the affair allegations. After investigating, the commission found “very little credibility to this complaint” and dismissed it. The commission’s investigative report was supposed to be confidential, but the state legislature leaked it to a local news outlet, prompting Cox and the state legislature to demand an “independent” investigation.

The ensuing publicity, and a host of death threats, made Hagan’s life so miserable that in early May, she decided to resign. “[M]y family and friends did not choose public life,” she wrote to Cox in her resignation letter. “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, in January, the legislature voted to expand the state supreme court by two additional judges, even though the existing court said it didn’t need more help. This month, Cox appointed two men with no judicial experience to fill the seats, including a senior counsel for the LDS church. Once the new judges are in place, it seems inevitable that the state legislature will go back to court to challenge the district maps to ensure that the 2026 midterm election will be the last time Utah Democrats have a shot at sending someone to Congress.

Taking advice and inspiration from opponents of a planned immigration detention center near Hagerstown, a newly formed advocacy group in Utah is preparing a lawsuit in hopes of stopping a similar project in Salt Lake City.

The group, Uproar Utah, announced its plans Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the city and Salt Lake County sued to block the proposed detention mega-center that could hold up to 10,000 people.

The city and county’s lawsuit mostly centers on allegations that the federal government, seeking to carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, blew past requirements for planning and conducting environmental reviews.

The advocacy group, an arm of the Utah Refugee Justice League, is focusing on those themes, too. But it’s also homing in on issues of fairness and due process for those who may someday be held at the Salt Lake City facility of more than 830,000 square feet.

“There is no way to respect the dignity, the human dignity, of 10,000 men, women, and children crammed into a warehouse jail,” said Brent Ward, a former U.S. attorney for Utah. “By definition, it’s insane. It’s inhumane. It’s contrary to Utah’s values. It is not who we are.”

The group shared with reporters on Tuesday a notice of its intent to sue the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying it’s still seeking additional plaintiffs that could include Utahns already detained by ICE. Ward said they want to support and supplement the city and county’s case, and they’ve been in touch with the attorneys behind it.

In Maryland’s Washington County, construction of a detention center was placed on hold in April by a federal judge who cited environmental considerations. U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson ruled that ICE could continue with more limited work, including on offices within the warehouse and changes to the HVAC system and roof, Maryland Matters reported. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) had sued to put the project on hold.

Uproar Utah contends in both Maryland and in Salt Lake City, Homeland Security and ICE showed “complete disregard” for requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. The group’s also raising concerns about the spread of disease and the quality of medical care in ICE facilities.

ICE bought the Salt Lake City property for $145.4 million in March, one of its most expensive purchases, just days after the firing of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, paused new warehouse deals as the agency reviews contracts from Noem’s time in the job.

In response to a request for comment on Monday’s lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security sent an unsigned, prepared statement to Utah News Dispatch Tuesday, reiterating its recent remarks to multiple news outlets. The department did not weigh in on Uproar Utah’s Tuesday announcement.

“As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals,” the department said in the statement. “As Secretary Mullin said in his confirmation hearing: ‘I will work with the community leaders and make sure that we are delivering for the American people what the President set out … We want to work with community leaders. We want to be good partners.’”

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Marie Cornwall, executive director of the newly formed group and a retired sociology professor, said at a news conference in Salt Lake City Tuesday that opponents of the center in Maryland have been “very helpful” in guiding the group’s response in Utah.

During the news conference, Liliana Bolaños with Mormon Women for Ethical Government joined in condemning the warehouses as inhumane. She moved to the U.S. with her family at 2 years old, she said, and for more than 25 years, “our application sat in a backlog so deep that my entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood passed without any protection from deportation or legal status.”

She said the stories of “countless Utah families all point to the same truth: the system is broken, not the people living inside it.”

The attorneys did not detail a timeframe for when they anticipate filing their planned lawsuit.

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— This story first appeared in Utah News Dispatch, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.

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Utah is suffering from such dry conditions that a group of kids with matches and a squirrel managed to start separate brush fires within hours, according to local media reports.

The ongoing severe drought in Utah has created the perfect conditions for destructive fires, prompting officials to warn that this year’s fire season could be particularly severe. Those concerns were highlighted Tuesday after firefighters battled two separate blazes in northern Utah.

A squirrel tangled in a power line managed to spark a half-acre brush fire Tuesday morning in Layton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, according to local outlet FOX 13. Later that day, children playing with matches reportedly started a brush fire that burned an acre in Saratoga Springs, a city on the northwestern shore of Utah Lake.

Both fires were extinguished, and it appears no one was injured, according to FOX 13. The Independent has requested more information from fire officials in Layton and Saratoga Springs.

This comes as firefighters battle multiple major blazes throughout the state.

The South Mountain Fire in northwestern Utah has burned through more than 1,800 acres and was at 40 percent containment as of Wednesday morning. The Tower Fire, which is burning near the small town of Scipio in central Utah, is currently 34 percent contained after spreading to more than 1,300 acres.

Utah fire officials have warned the ongoing drought, combined with warmer temperatures and low snowfall earlier this year, led to lots of dry vegetation that could serve as fuel for destructive fires.

“This year’s conditions, even more than recent years, are raising concern,” Salt Lake City Fire Chief Karl Lieb said at a press conference last month.

“If we all take this seriously now, our agencies and the public together, we can reduce the number of fires, limit how fast they spread, and better protect the communities we all care about,” Unified Fire Chief Dominic Burchett added.

Officials are asking residents to take steps to prevent wildfires, such as refraining from starting campfires on windy days and exercising caution when shooting outdoors.

“We identify target shooting as one of the behaviors that contribute to human-caused wildfires in the state,” a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and Estate Lands told ABC 4 this week.

Last year, fires burned more than 165,000 acres in Utah, which cost the state more than $191 million, according to KSL News. Still, firefighters managed to keep 92 percent of those fires under 10 acres.

(NewsNation) — “Shark Tank” star and celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary is defending the massive data center project he’s backing after Utah residents and a progressive nonprofit sued last week.

He joined “Morning in America” Wednesday to debunk what he says is misinformation about the project.

“As an industry, as developers of these projects, the demand is insatiable because we’re in a global competition for AI and for cloud compute,” O’Leary said. “But in every single location, I don’t care whether it’s Michigan, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, if you announce you’re doing a data center, all of a sudden you get a plethora of misinformation.”

Americans opt for nuclear plant over AI data center in backyard: Poll

The Alliance for a Better Utah and a group of five anonymous residents filed the lawsuit in Utah’s 3rd District Court June 3 against government officials and the Military Installation Development Authority, a special entity overseeing the project.

The planned Stratos Project data center in Box Elder County, Utah, would span tens of thousands of acres and would be built on mostly private, unincorporated land.

The plaintiffs in the suit are challenging the constitutionality of the special entity and its approval of the project.

Kevin O’Leary: Misinformation about data centers stoking agitation

“The Stratos Project Area Plan, and actions taken by MIDA and the Commission to enact the same, puts lawmaking power respecting questions of public health, safety, welfare, morals, taxation, zoning, land use, and the like, in relation to a significant swath of county territory in a non-elected MIDA Board,” the complaint said.

Communities and state lawmakers have begun pushing back against the massive data centers needed to power AI, citing electricity use, water demands and higher costs for residents.

But O’Leary says the technology of today’s data centers is “more efficient.”

“What happened 20 years ago when they built them in Virginia, they got a bad rap there because it was really early technology,” O’Leary said. “Yes, it used a lot of water. Yes, it was noisy. Yes, it created heat. That tech is gone. The new-era data center is far more efficient, much smaller footprint, doesn’t use as much water, if any… I think as we get the real facts out, we’ll turn this around.”

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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