Brent Davis thinks he grows the tastiest tomatoes. For four generations, his family has farmed and ranched near the eastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, 45 minutes north of Salt Lake City. He claims his tomatoes are chock-full of minerals thanks to their proximity to the inland sea: “My wife says they’re already salted.”
Davis and his brothers raise cattle, and Davis also runs a meat shop. In addition, Davis grows watermelons, squash and thousands of tomatoes that he sells at a farmers market in Evanston, Wyoming.
West Weber, in Weber County, where Davis lives, still feels rural. The smell of manure wafts in the air and thousands of acres of green irrigated fields stretch to the horizon. But it’s changing: Over the last half-century, farms have sold and canneries shut down, while suburban sprawl and outside industry have crept in. Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake is disappearing. Once-verdant wetlands of dense cattails and open water that nourished waterfowl, insects and other creatures are now depleted or built over. In 1986, the lake swelled and flooded nearby communities; now, on windy days, arsenic-laden dust blows from patches of dried-up lakebed.
Davis remembers when a mineral evaporation operation began in Ogden Bay, west of his farm, in the late 1960s. A decade later, Western Zirconium started manufacturing materials for nuclear fuel rods nearby. Maybe six cars a day passed his house when he was a kid, Davis estimates; now, he thinks it’s closer to a thousand.
So when the Utah Inland Port Authority created a 9,000-acre industrial area near his family’s property last May, Davis wasn’t surprised. “They’re taking away the natural environment for their concrete jungles,” he said. “Some people really love concrete jungles. I don’t.”
The West Weber Project Area is one of the larger, more controversial development zones overseen by the Utah Inland Port Authority, or UIPA. A quasi-governmental agency charged with making Utah a leader in global trade and economic growth, the Port Authority’s primary tool is financing. UIPA offers incentives to businesses and pays for water, sewer and other public infrastructure with state funds and property taxes.
Its board decides when and where to promote development, though cities or counties retain zoning authority and must welcome UIPA before it can come in. Utah’s governor, House speaker and Senate president appoint voting board members, who include government and business leaders. Because they’re appointed and the House speaker and Senate president don’t represent everyone impacted by UIPA, environmental and public health watchdogs say the board is not directly accountable to local communities.
“Some people really love concrete jungles. I don’t.”
And many communities are impacted by UIPA, which is driving a massive, coordinated influx of industry across the state. In 2018, the Utah Legislature created UIPA, giving it jurisdiction over a 16,000-acre area in Salt Lake County, near the airport. Then, in 2023, UIPA started establishing satellite ports, called project areas, to create a statewide manufacturing and shipping network. Over about 18 months, UIPA ballooned from one to a dozen project areas.
Utah’s state motto is “Industry,” and the Great Salt Lake’s shores and wetlands have seen it all: Landfills, refineries, salt mines, smelters, bombing ranges and now, inland ports. Five of UIPA’s newer project areas, as well as its original Salt Lake County one, are in the Great Salt Lake Basin.
But today, the Great Salt Lake is dying. It reached a record low in 2022, due to climate change-induced drought and farms, municipalities and industry taking too much water. In a 2023 report, scientists from several universities, community groups and others said that the ecosystem could collapse as soon as 2028. News feeds warned of a toxic dust-bowl future, and Utahns, who once viewed the funky-smelling, salty lake with indifference or disdain, launched organizations to save it.
Residents fear that more industrial development will dry up the inland sea and destroy its wetlands, boost air pollution and traffic and smother rural life.
They’re worried about accountability, too. Even though most public comments opposed those five project areas, the UIPA board approved each one — along with every other project area it publicly considered. UIPA has lacked public transparency, according to state audits, but emails High Country News obtained through record requests show that UIPA has communicated closely with developers and local officials eager for rapid growth.
Recently, UIPA has made some changes; a new wetland policy, for example, sets aside financing for mitigation and limits where developers can build to receive incentives. Still, as the Great Salt Lake continues to wither, community members wonder whether boosting industrial development is the best way to build the future they’d like to see for the lake — and for themselves.
WEARING A WHITE BUTTON-UP SHIRT under a black suit, Ben Hart, UIPA’s executive director, stood next to farmland not far from Davis’ home in West Weber. It was a cloudy May morning, and shallow patches of standing water covered the land. California gulls yeowed overhead while American avocets dipped their long beaks into the pools.
A pin of UIPA’s logo — a “U” composed of green quadrangles — stood out on Hart’s lapel. He was hired as UIPA’s director in September 2022, two months before the lake reached its record low. His job is to promote and generate development. But he aims to be environmentally minded, even as UIPA’s expansion occurs under his watch. Since Hart took over, UIPA’s branding has gone from blue and gray to shades of green. Its website now has images of a songbird perched on a branch and a kid holding a cardboard cutout of Earth.
“We’re not going to try and hide any of the wetlands today,” he told me and other reporters on a media tour that day. A few hours later, the UIPA Board would designate the spot where we stood as part of the West Weber Project Area.
As the Great Salt Lake recedes, wetlands disappear and invasive species encroach. The majority of Utah’s remaining wetlands surround the Great Salt Lake. They sequester carbon, filter pollution from agricultural runoff, prevent floods by absorbing storm surges and provide food and habitat for millions of migrating birds. “Fringe wetlands are no longer hydrologically connected in most places because the lake has gone down so much,” Karin Kettenring, a wetland ecologist at Utah State University, said. If UIPA encourages building here, developers might pave over the last patches of this complex ecosystem.
Last year, Utah legislators acknowledged industry’s role in the crisis, increasing regulations on mineral extraction from the lake including lithium and potash evaporation ponds. But the state doesn’t proactively consider the cumulative consequences of piecemeal development within the lake’s watershed, including inland port activity. Even building close to wetlands can harm them, for example, as impervious surfaces boost stormwater runoff. “One of our failures as humans is being unable to visualize what the bigger impacts might be,” Kettenring said. It’s “death by a thousand cuts.”
Environmental activists and community members with a group called Stop the Polluting Ports Coalition have consistently criticized UIPA, regularly protesting as it expanded around the lake in 2023. They want to halt “state-subsidized industrial development” on and near the lake’s wetlands.
After months of criticism about UIPA’s growth, Hart sought to change the public’s perception through a new wetland policy. “We have to do a better job protecting the wetlands here in the state of Utah, and if we don’t, shame on us,” he said on the media tour. He then dove into the details of UIPA’s plans.
UIPA’s project areas host a mixture of distribution warehouses, manufacturing businesses and shipping facilities that move freight between trucks, trains and planes. Plans typically outline broad possibilities, from data centers and renewable energy development to aerospace and defense activities. UIPA has deals with businesses ranging from weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman to steel producer Nucor.
When UIPA establishes a project area, the county or town and all relevant taxing entities, including school and fire districts, forfeit a percentage of newly generated property taxes — up to 75% — to the Port Authority for 25 years. UIPA returns that tax money to businesses and public infrastructure in the project area, though in some cases, a percentage goes to environmental protection or community programs like affordable housing.
Now, a percentage also goes to wetlands. In November 2023, UIPA’s board released a policy dedicating at least 1% of the taxes it receives from projects in the Great Salt Lake Basin to wetland mitigation and protection. In West Weber, that figure is 3%.
And while UIPA cannot regulate where private landowners can build, it can restrict the money it hands out. For example, it won’t give money to developers that build on wetlands in West Weber. Still, most parcels in project areas have already been zoned for industry by a local government, so UIPA aims to influence what it sees as inevitable development. “When the port comes in, we can actually help identify and create potential revenue streams to protect these natural areas,” Hart told me.
“We have to do a better job protecting the wetlands, and if we don’t, shame on us.”
To help shape what that will look like, UIPA brought in Joel Ferry, director of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources and an influential leader on Great Salt Lake issues, as a non-voting board member in March 2024. Ferry wanted to ensure UIPA didn’t transform wetlands into acres of pavement, particularly near two state waterfowl management areas in West Weber. This relationship helped spur UIPA to donate $2.5 million to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources late last fall for wetland protection on the lake’s southeast shore. Hart believes such efforts show that development and environmental protection can coexist.
Community advocates have also informed UIPA’s actions. Jack Ray, president of the Utah Waterfowl Association and member of the Rudy Duck Club, fell in love with the Great Salt Lake while duck hunting as a teenager. He and his friends would linger in the marshes until sunset, when the sky burst into a vivid orange. When he saw UIPA expanding around the lake, he took Hart to wetlands near the Port Authority’s original area. “I think he immediately understood what was at stake,” Ray said.
UIPA’s grant to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources will help the agency and Salt Lake City purchase and protect several hundred acres of uplands near wetlands managed by the Rudy Duck Club. Thanks to both Ray and Ferry’s influence, UIPA has mandated other protections, such as a 600-foot buffer of no development around the waterfowl management areas in West Weber. A buffer, Ray said, helps contain sprawl.
“It basically creates a line in the mud,” he told me.
Still, if any projects harm wetlands as defined by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, federal law requires developers to restore or create new wetlands to compensate.
But scientists have found that constructed wetlands rarely function as well as natural ones. Ben Abbott, ecologist at Brigham Young University and lead author of the 2023 report that warned about the lake’s impending destruction, said that wetland mitigation is the “highest-cost, least-value” strategy to protect an ecosystem. The least-cost, highest-value approach? Conservation: “leaving wetlands as they are, where they are.”
Abbott said UIPA’s approach is “better than nothing.” But it looks “more like greenwashing than a substantive protection for the environment.”
Many agree it’s better not to build in sensitive zones in the first place. “We know development is going to happen,” Brad Parry, vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said. “It’s just, did you really pick the best area?”
Historically, the Northwestern Shoshone lived along the lake’s bountiful wetlands, with plentiful waterfowl for food, clean drinking water and willows and cattails for shelters and cradleboards.
Over the past 150 years, however, colonization and settlers’ subsequent industrial and residential development have destroyed much of the wetlands important to the Northwestern Shoshone. Today, the tribe’s headquarters is roughly 7 miles east of the West Weber Project Area, and while UIPA has asked the tribe about cultural resources, it has not consulted it about wetlands.
And wetland destruction is the tribe’s main concern when it comes to UIPA. It’s a field in which Parry has expertise: He previously worked for the Bureau of Reclamation overseeing several wetland mitigation projects across the Colorado River Basin. Only about a quarter of the projects, he told me, “mirrored what they had lost.”
THE DAY AFTER UIPA’S MEDIA TOUR, Rhonda Lauritzen, a Weber County resident, drove me to the Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area, a marsh at the south edge of the project area, passing Davis’ meat-cutting business along the way.
She parked at a gate and got out of the car, pointing out a hawk flying overhead. The sun-warmed air smelled fresh and earthy. “This is my happy place,” she said. Lauritzen frequently walks the paths through the wetland, spotting snakes, rabbits, coyotes, muskrats and mallards.
Lauritzen opposes the West Weber Project Area, worried it will harm wildlife and the landscape. But she’s not flat-out anti-industry; her family has made a living from the Great Salt Lake. Their business, Mineral Resources International, extracts minerals from evaporation ponds for supplements and electrolyte powders, taking about 125 acre-feet of water from the lake per year. (By comparison, Compass Minerals, the lake’s biggest operator, used 111,700 acre-feet on average annually between 2017 and 2021.)
Lauritzen believes wetlands improve the quality of the minerals her family extracts. “One of the things we say is that the wetlands are the water filter,” she said.
“We know development is going to happen. It’s just, did you really pick the best area?”
We got back in the car and drove to our next stop: the same standing water that Hart had stood by the day before. The few clouds in the bright blue sky reflected in the water. “You can hear the meadowlarks,” she said as she stepped out of her car. “Doo, doo, do, do, do, doo.” While Lauritzen talked less about tax incentives than Hart did, she noted UIPA’s new wetland policies. “I’d like to think that some of the pushback moved the needle,” she told me.
Lauritzen and Davis are among the many Weber County residents who have shared concerns about development with UIPA and local officials. Before a project area goes to UIPA’s board, local elected leaders must approve it. On Jan. 2, 2024, the Weber County Commission considered a resolution supporting the 9,000-acre West Weber Project Area. The public notice for the meeting was posted on Dec. 29. Despite short notice over a holiday, 19 people, including Davis, showed up to speak. Only one clearly supported it. The commission passed the resolution anyway.
“They pretty well do what they want, whether we like it or not,” Davis said.
For Weber County officials, UIPA provides a way to finance development it has been planning and promoting for decades. “The inland port is a partner at the table,” Stephanie Russell, Weber County’s economic development director and government relations liaison, said. “They’re not driving the train.”
Most of the West Weber Project Area has been zoned for industry since 1958, long before the Port Authority existed. Yet it’s still mostly undeveloped. “Anytime we try and get someone to bite, there’s not enough sewer, there’s not enough water, and it’s too far away from the freeway,” Charlie Ewert, Weber County principal planner, said.
Port opponents question whether development would actually occur without UIPA’s help, since it hasn’t for the past 70 years. Perhaps, but it would likely happen more slowly.
UIPA provides a more expeditious process than another government tool: community reinvestment areas, which, like UIPA, use newly generated property taxes from a designated zone to spur growth. But while reinvestment areas need approval from every taxing entity — there are more than a dozen in West Weber — UIPA needed support from just one group there: the county commission.
After Weber County leaders voted for a UIPA project area, county residents continued to email commissioners their concerns, as shown by correspondence High Country News obtained through a public records request. But commissioners often forwarded emails to Russell, an unelected county employee, apparently for her to handle. (Commissioner Gage Froerer explained that they often “refer a question to the person that has the right answers” to respond to queries.)
Rob Vanderwood, mayor of West Haven, about 6 miles south of the West Weber Project Area, viewed this as the commission bucking accountability. When Russell responded to concerns Vanderwood sent to commissioners, Vanderwood replied that his email was directed to “the right people (the commissioners) that actually vote for this approval.”
Residents asked to meet with commissioners a month before the proposed West Weber project went to the UIPA board. Instead, four days before UIPA’s board meeting, the county held a public question-and-answer session. Russell moderated, while Hart, a local developer, a regional economic development leader and Ewert spoke as panelists.
The county commissioners, Lauritzen said, “didn’t even show their faces.”
IN ONE INSTANCE, LOCAL OFFICIALS and UIPA even neglected to consult homeowners within project area boundaries. Eighty miles south of the West Weber Project Area, on the other side of the Great Salt Lake, sagebrush-covered peaks punctuate the otherwise flat expanse of Tooele County’s Basin and Range landscape. Here, next to beige fields where horses and cows graze, UIPA approved two project areas in December 2023.
Chris Eddington and his neighbor Macayla Anderson learned their properties were included in one, the Tooele Valley Project Area, during the UIPA board meeting to finalize it. “We’ve got a problem,” Eddington told board members before they voted. “My properties are on these (maps).” They told Eddington they’d talk to him after the meeting. Every public comment except one opposed the projects. But it didn’t matter; the board approved them anyway.
High Country News reviewed all written comments to UIPA from September 2022 to January 2025. Only four supported development in the Great Salt Lake Basin, while 273 opposed it. The majority of in-person comments regarding projects around the lake were also opposed.
Emails HCN obtained through a public record request confirm that by the time a proposal reaches UIPA’s board, it is essentially a done deal. “When the public sees it, it’s usually something that’s pretty well vetted” with local officials, Hart told me. Before the board approved the Golden Spike Project Area near the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, just north of Weber County, UIPA sent invites to local leaders that said, “Join the Utah Inland Port Authority and its partners as they create the Golden Spike Inland Port Project Area.” A few days before the meeting, the line for Golden Spike on a “hot sheet” of projects UIPA was considering said, “To be created in Brigham City on 8/21/23 at 2 pm.”
In West Weber, it appears that UIPA staff and a developer assumed the board would approve the project. Staffers began working on a development agreement with the BlackPine Group months before the board created the project area.
While UIPA and local officials have rejected residents’ pleas to halt projects, records show they frequently communicated with another group of local landowners: developers.
Emails show that real estate developers asked county and city government officials to swiftly advance the two project areas in Tooele County.
Zenith Bolinder LLC, a partnership between Zenith Development and Bolinder Resources, owns most of the land in the Tooele Valley Project Area. Zenith’s managing director, Charles Akerlow, was once head of the Utah Republican Party, and in 1990 was sentenced to a year in prison for failure to file and pay federal excise taxes. Zenith Bolinder is also on Tooele County’s 2024 property tax delinquency list.
Public records show Akerlow communicated with Tooele County officials for over a year about creating an industrial area. In early 2023, he told a council member that UIPA was interested in creating a project area around his company’s property. Not long after, Akerlow wrote to the county’s community development director: “We have much to do and the sooner we can start the better.”
Meanwhile, Thane Smith of the Romney Group (founded by Mitt Romney’s son Josh Romney) was pushing the town of Grantsville to establish another project area in Tooele County. Smith drafted a resolution for the city council, which voted to support a UIPA project area just over a week later.
When the soil warmed up last spring, excavators began preparing land for building near Eddington’s and Anderson’s homes. As of late January, UIPA said no specific business was planning to move in, but emails between UIPA and Akerlow show that they have discussed companies that manufacture plastics, metals and prefabricated houses.
UIPA eventually removed Eddington’s and Anderson’s properties from the project area at their request. But after months of semi trucks kicking up dust around their homes, both families sold to an infrastructure district associated with Zenith Bolinder, closing in late December.
“If you want the more rural lifestyle,” Eddington said, “it’s getting harder and harder in Utah.”
“We have much to do and the sooner we can start the better.”
IN SEPTEMBER, the Center for Biological Diversity and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment sued UIPA, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, R, and legislative leaders. The suit argues that UIPA’s governance structure is illegal under the separation of powers principle and limits the public’s ability to hold state officials accountable. (A bill introduced in the 2025 legislative session would change that structure and could impact the case.) Eddington and Anderson initially participated in the lawsuit, but stopped after negotiations with Akerlow. “The game is on,” Akerlow emailed the Tooele County manager about his deal with the two families.
The lawsuit proceeds, however, and if it’s successful, all inland port projects approved in northern Utah since 2022 could become void.
Meanwhile, concerned residents continue to meet. On a hot July evening last year, Weber County locals and organizers with the Stop the Polluting Ports Coalition gathered. Thick smog from wildfires blurred the outline of nearby mountains. Despite the smoky air, 75 people filled long metal picnic tables under a shaded park pavilion. Weber County’s Stephanie Russell and two members of UIPA’s staff also showed up and sat at the back.
Rhonda Lauritzen facilitated. “This is our meeting,” she said. “This is our agenda.”
People introduced themselves. A few had driven an hour from Salt Lake City, but almost everyone lived in Weber County.
When Davis had the mic, he gestured to 12th Street, 400 feet north of the pavilion. “This road here, when I was a boy, we played on it,” he said. “There was no traffic. Now, it’s hard to get across.” Davis, whose property spans both sides of the street, finds it difficult to drive his tractor from one field to another. He and many others worry about the dangers, air pollution and commotion more traffic will bring to their historically rural area.
After Davis spoke, people listed off more concerns, ranging from disappearing wetlands to dying farms. Then the conversation turned to what the community wants from UIPA, including a health impact study and local input in decisions. When the meeting wrapped up, as a peach-colored sunset filled the hazy sky, Lauritzen and others collected contact information to continue organizing the community, hoping to shape their local leaders’ vision for the county’s future.
“OUR INSATIABLE APPETITE for growth is not sustainable,” Lauritzen told me as we drove out of the West Weber Project Area last May. “Can we as humans evolve to recognize what is enough? It’s a tough question.”
Despite UIPA’s new wetland policies, the Stop the Polluting Ports Coalition still sees it as the greatest threat to Great Salt Lake wetlands.
But for local government officials like Ewert, Weber County’s planner, UIPA provides a path to help shape what he sees as inevitable. Growth, Ewert said, “is not good or bad. It just is.”
For communities that want to stop development, rezoning could help. Land use “is where you could probably really make the most significant difference in terms of protection,” Hart told me. But that comes with caveats: Current landowners would likely be entitled to develop according to the existing zoning, and any down-zoning could lower property values. In West Weber, many of Davis’ neighbors are aging, and their children want to sell the farm to the highest bidder. “I can almost guarantee there would be no political appetite to rezone any of that to something else,” Ewert said.
Meanwhile, Davis continues to hold onto his rural way of life. A few years ago, when the county widened 12th Street, he planted a sign that said “Not For Sale” in bold red letters in front of his farm. His feelings haven’t changed. “I’ve got a lot of sweat and tears in it,” Davis said. “I’m gonna stay here.”
Russel Albert Daniels is a documentary photographer based in Salt Lake City. His work illuminates overlooked histories of the American West, with a focus on Indigenous communities and their contemporary experiences.
Reporting for this project was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the March 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Industrial revolution.”
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