Utah State Auditor Tina Cannon’s office has launched a new online dashboard showing financial activity and other publicly available information for the Military Installation Development Authority, the special district behind a controversial proposal to build a massive data center in Box Elder County.
Cannon told Utah News Dispatch in an interview Thursday that her office built the dashboard after she was flooded with requests for more information about MIDA as debate over the data center has ramped up.
“Obviously this has been a very hot topic for the state of Utah, and anytime that happens, we get calls for additional audits or oversight,” Cannon said. “So we went out and looked at what is already (publicly available).”
Cannon called MIDA a “super” special district with city-like powers including bonding, land use authority, and the ability to control and capture tax increment, or taxes resulting from new development. She emphasized that it’s an organization with “a lot of complexity.”
“They have extra authority. They’re not a typical special service district. They are a super district. They have a lot of other powers,” Cannon said. “And the concerns being raised with us usually amount to one one of three things: How did they get the authority to do this? And that can be answered by the legislative history and the power structure. How did they fund all this? Where is the money going? That’s answered typically through their financial statements.”
Cannon said she’s also received questions of whether MIDA has acted appropriately and whether her office could audit the organization. However, as the dashboard shows, Cannon said that due to the level of complexity with all the different project areas and public infrastructure districts MIDA has created, her office would require an enormous amount of resources to do a “deep dive audit” of its dealings.
“The type of resources it would take to audit something this large, I hope, is illustrated by the website,” she said, noting that its reach spans far beyond the Box Elder County Stratos project. “It is a very large, complex organization with a lot of sub-entities and sub-projects, and I think just getting people to understand just how large of a question they were asking was our first motivation. This is just not one project. You’ve got to be more specific (in asking questions) because there’s a lot here.”
That’s the point she’s hoping the dashboard will help convey.
“The answers to people’s questions are not simple answers, because this is not a simple organization,” she said. “It’s very complex.”
In response to the outcry over the Box Elder County data center project and the broader questions it has raised about MIDA, Cannon’s office said in a news release Thursday that it developed the dashboard “to provide a centralized, easy-to-navigate resource of this information.”
“The new interactive dashboard is designed to provide publicly available information to help the public better understand MIDA: what it is, what it does, what authority it has, and how that authority has changed over time,” her office said.
The dashboard, now provided on the Transparent Utah website, includes the following information, dated from 2007 (when lawmakers first created the special district) through 2026:
- Legislative history and power: An inventory of MIDA’s statutory authority, municipal-type powers, public-private partnership capabilities, and property tax allocation authority.
- Project summaries and map: An interactive map of MIDA project areas, including Falcon Hill, the Military Recreation Facility (Deer Valley East Village), the Utah Data Center at Camp Williams in Utah County, the Mountain Veterans Program at Sundance, and the newly announced Stratos Project Area in Box Elder County.
- Documents and meeting materials: Centralized access to hundreds of documents, including project area plans, board member histories, entity relationship charts, and public meeting materials.
Financial activity trendline: A summary and visualization of MIDA’s financial statements data, detailing total revenues, expenditures, assets, liabilities, and debt service through 2025.
“Compiling nearly 20 years of public information and complex data into an accessible interface, all in one place, this tool empowers Utahns to find information about MIDA’s history, scope, projects, and financial operations,” the auditor’s office said. “It will continue to be updated and expanded as additional information becomes available.”
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
