conditions supported by substantial evidence on the record and in the original findings reports. Conditional use permits were never intended to serve as blanket authorizations for large-scale extractive industries, continuous energy generation facilities, or industrial operations whose core impacts include air emissions, noise, heavy truck traffic, land consumption, and water risks that are inherent to the use itself and not meaningfully mitigable through conditions of those uses are approved without rigorous evidence-based findings, the CUP framework is not managing impact. It is blatantly avoiding scrutiny. At the same time, Duchesne County has formally recognized through its own zoning amendments that industrial development has damaged County Roads, threatened rural infrastructure, and raised public health, safety, and welfare concerns.

Once harms are known and foreseeable, Utah law requires heightened diligence, not relaxed standards. Yet the record reflects the opposite approach. Hearings are compressed, incomplete or fragmented applications are accepted, critical impact analysis is deferred to future permits or other agencies, and promises of later compliance are substituted for present evidence. This is not lawful discretion; it's negligence. Even in that broader context, the Nine Mile LLC data center did not arise in isolation.

It represents a permitting system that has drifted from its legal foundation and now treats conditional use permits as shortcuts for industrial approval rather than safeguards for the public. Enforcement has effectively been shifted onto residents with reliance on complaint-driven responses. Even when approvals involve continuous impacts to air quality, noise, traffic, and public safety that require proactive county oversight. Under Utah law and Duchesne County Code, that approach is unlawful. Conditional use permits must include enforceable conditions supported by substantial evidence, and the county has an affirmative duty to monitor and enforce compliance. Residents are not regulators; it is an undue burden on us to be responsible for that.

Residents are not paid, inspectors. They lack the authority to access sites, measure emissions, monitor noise or light, or enforce environmental standards. The law does not permit the county to approve high-impact industrial uses on the assumption that neighbors will report violations after harm has already occurred.

This pattern has also produced economic harm that is largely ignored by the findings, or in the findings. While these projects are framed as economic development, the record does not show sustained local employment proportional to their impact. Many of these facilities generate few long-term jobs while imposing substantial long-term costs on infrastructure, public services, and adjacent land. Large data centers and energy generation facilities illustrate this clearly. They require extensive land consumption, enormous energy inputs, and continuous industrial operation, yet employ relatively small permanent workforces. The economic benefits are narrow and concentrated, while the burdens are broad, cumulative, and long-lasting.

At the same time, industrialization of agricultural and rural areas depresses property values, disrupts farming and ranching operations, and displaces locally rooted economic activity that has historically sustained this county. These impacts are foreseeable and documented, yet they receive little meaningful analysis in the findings. This appeal, therefore, turns on a central legal issue: did the April 2nd approval lawfully evaluate what the administrative record establishes as a single integrated industrial project on the South Myton Bench, or did the county approve that project in disconnected pieces without making the findings required by its own code? It was unfortunately the latter. Under Duchesne County Code Section 8-13-4, conditional use may be approved only if the commission makes specific evidence-based findings that the use will not be materially detrimental to public health, safety, or public welfare, and that it complies with the General Plan, and that the site is adequate to support the use in a manner compatible with surrounding land uses.

Those findings must be made at the time of approval and address how the project will actually function, exist, and operate on the ground in real time. Here, the administrative record demonstrates functional integration. The data center and related facilities are energy-intensive, continuously operational industrial facilities. The natural gas plant and solar facility proposed, sized, and sited to supply that demand. The ReWater expansion intensifies industrial activity in the same corridor.

None of these uses stands alone in practice. They are interdependent, coordinated, and