Not our first rodeo: Utah’s NIMBY protests go way back

Originally published June 1, 2026.

What do you know about the “Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center”?

That imposing name has been generally boiled down to “Utah Data Center” and a whole lot of us drive by it every day. It’s up against the Traverse Mountains at the Utah National Guard’s Camp Williams in Bluffdale.

And just like today, Utahns were up in arms a decade and a half ago over the possibility of a data center coming to our backyard. Proposed — and eventually built — by the National Security Agency, the project created all sorts of angst among the populace. 

Back then, our concerns were very different than the reasons we are on the warpath over Kevin O’Leary’s massive “Wonder Valley” project in Cache County. Today, our worries are very much environmental. What will the 40,000-acre development do to the air and water? Will it impact an already desperately endangered Great Salt Lake? Will our rural serenity be shattered?

From the first announcement in 2009 that the NSA was going to spend a couple of billion dollars to build an “intelligence-gathering” data center at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, we began to worry about our privacy. After all, “intelligence” means spying and the bad guys are in Asia, not Utah County (well, mostly). “It’s top secret,” we were told, and armed police and military patrolled the site beginning with the first turn of a shovel. Organized protests at the site and at the Utah Capitol were seen regularly right up to the center’s opening in 2014 and beyond.

This was the first we’d heard about data centers. Oh, there were some large computer “server farms” around, but the designation “data center” was just coming into vogue. We began seeing terms like zettabytes and exabytes to describe the data storage capacity of the Utah Data Center. But the NSA wasn’t about to tell us exactly what was going on out there. One thing was certain: Compared to anything we knew about, its computers held allotabytes. 

At the risk of sounding like the grandpa that I am, those were different times. During the construction of the Utah Data Center, U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s name began to scream from the headlines. His leaks revealed the extent to which intelligence agencies (can you say “NSA”?) were gobbling up the communications of everyday citizens. His disclosures ignited a major international debate about privacy, government overreach and civil liberties. And they fueled the vigor with which Utahns tried to stop the Utah Data Center.

The Utah project became a global symbol of government spying. Demonstrators — both local and from around the globe — gathered outside the barbed wire-topped perimeter construction fences and tied yellow ribbons to its posts in protest of the Fourth Amendment implications of the center’s announced, but clouded, purpose. Activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched a 135-foot airship over the site with a banner reading “Illegal Spying Below,” citing “dragnet surveillance.” A Republican state lawmaker even went so far as to introduce an unsuccessful bill aimed at shutting down the water supply to the secret facility so it couldn’t operate.

Well, it all went for naught. In mid-2014 (as far as we know) the Utah Data Center went operational and now, a dozen years later, it hardly gets noticed. Younger folks often ask, “What’s that big building over there?”

What do you suppose would be our reaction if the Point of the Mountain facility were proposed today? In addition to anxiety over privacy, today’s Utahns seem a lot more tuned in to environmental concerns. It’s interesting to note that media reports at the time the Utah Data Center went online estimated its daily water usage at 1.7 million gallons per day or 620 million gallons per year. Ironically, that’s almost the exact amount (1,900 acre-feet) involved in the Box Elder County water rights transfer filing recently withdrawn by the private property owner whose land will become part of the Wonder Valley project.

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To be sure, the Utah Data Center demonstrations weren’t the only time Beehive Staters hit the street in protest of projects we didn’t like:

• Way back in the middle of the last century, environmentalists, river advocates and wilderness groups fiercely opposed the construction of Glen Canyon Dam and the flooding of hundreds of square miles of pristine red rock canyonlands. The dam was ultimately built but the controversy had a lasting effect on environmental politics in Utah. To this day, advocacy groups still suggest the dam be demolished and the lake drained.

• The dissenters won one in the early 1980s. The U.S. government proposed installing hundreds of nuclear MX missile shelters across western Utah and Nevada. Opposed by ranchers, environmentalists, peace activists and a rare alliance between urban liberals and conservative rural Utahns, the proposal was withdrawn in 1982.

• A coalition of very much the same people who blocked the MX missile deployment were successful in ending plans to put a high-level nuclear waste storage facility on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation. Proposed by a consortium of nuclear utilities, the fight lasted for years and became seen nationally as a conflict involving environmental justice, tribal sovereignty and nuclear risk. 

Utahns have continued through the years to conduct public battles over land use (Bears Ears), eminent domain (freeway expansion), mining (Kennecott expansion) and many other causes.

Our state has found protests become especially powerful when they unite unusual coalitions — ranchers, environmentalists, local conservatives, tribes, church groups, urban activists and more. 

The current debate in Box Elder County mimics earlier fights because opponents see the project not as a single development, but as a symbol of a broader transformation of Utah’s landscape and economy.

I hear the strong collective voice of many Utahns crying, “Not In My Back Yard.”