The day after the Box Elder County Commission cleared the way for the massive Stratos data center project to move forward, a planning organization came through a county employee’s email inbox with an invite.

Join a symposium this fall, the invite from the Utah chapter of the American Planning Association said, to talk about the county planning department’s work on the sprawling project backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary.

It seemed like an interesting event, the county’s senior planner, Marcus Wager, replied. But department officials, he said, wouldn’t be good panelists.

“Unfortunately,” Wager said, “our department has not been involved in the process at all.”

The May 5 email exchange, which was obtained and verified by The Salt Lake Tribune, shows how little Box Elder County officials had to do with one of the biggest projects in Utah’s history before it landed in front of them.

Wager said work on the development had been going on “with the state behind the scenes” long before Box Elder County commissioners were told “anything about it.”

“It seems like this was a done deal before anyone involved our commissioners,” Wager wrote. “It felt like this was a ‘we can do this with or without you’ kind of thing.”

Wager added that he believed the data center would have “found a way to happen” regardless of zoning in the project area.

The County Commission was first briefed on the project on March 25, county spokesperson Lynette Crockett said, but by that point, state officials, the developer and participating landowners had already discussed the proposed data center campus.

“During that meeting, the commissioners expressed frustration that the county had not been engaged earlier in the process and that they were being introduced to a significant proposal after months of discussions had already occurred,” Crockett said. “Their concerns were focused on the process, transparency, and timing of the county’s involvement rather than on the merits of the project itself.”

Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, the quasi-governmental organization that approved the data center project in April, is an independent land use authority, so the project did not go through the county’s normal review processes, Crockett said.

Typically, she said, Box Elder County’s community development officials and its planning and zoning staff are involved earlier in a project. Once a MIDA project area is approved, planning, permitting and land use approvals bypass the county and go through the agency itself, Crockett said.

“While the county is not the land use authority for the project, it remains committed to transparency, public engagement, and ensuring local perspectives continue to be heard as the project moves forward,” Crockett said.

Kristin Kenney Williams, a spokesperson for MIDA, said Box Elder County experts will be weighing in once MIDA creates a “development review committee.”

“All that has been done to date is to create the project area boundary,” Williams said. “There hasn’t been a development plan submitted.”