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 Valley, 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 813.4, 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, manner compatible with surrounding land uses.

Those findings must be made at the time of the approval, and they must 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 an energy-intensive, continuous industrial use. 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 designed to operate together, imposing combined impacts on a single landscape, the Southland Kingdom. The South Mountain bench is not an isolated industrial zone. It is a transitional area used by residents, ranchers, hunters, recreationists, and visitors accessing Nine Mile Canyon and surrounding public lands. It functions as a gateway corridor reliant on shared roads, open views, quiet recreation, and limited emergency services.