Brenna Williams got the news Thursday afternoon that her plan to push back on the hyperscale data center in her county had been rejected by the Box Elder County Attorney.

“Everybody kind of lost it,” Williams said in an interview of members of the Box Elder Accountability Referendum, or bear, which is sponsoring a pair of proposed referendums.

Williams and the other BEAR members were hoping to put the question of the county commissioners’ recent approval of the data center plan on the ballot for voters to consider. But the county attorney determined this week that the decision could not legally be subject to a public vote.

County officials, Williams said, “don’t understand. They just energize us more.”

Earlier this week, before the county’s ruling was announced, BEAR members said they were prepared to take legal action if their application for a referendum was rejected. On Thursday, the group confirmed that plan: In a statement, the Utahns said they plan to appeal the decision to Utah’s 1st District Court.

Williams said Thursday evening that the group will file within a week, and that their attorneys feel confident that they have legal precedent to back them up.

“They’re only doing this to delay it so that it doesn’t get on the ballot in November,” Williams said.

And while she’s confident that residents will have a chance to stop the plan from going forward, she said she thinks the data center’s backers just hope to break ground before they take a vote, which could make it more difficult to stop the installation.

It doesn’t necessarily mean people can’t stop it, she said, but “it’ll just cost some more money.”

Williams also said her group is pursuing other avenues to push back on the data center, which she could not publicly share yet. The group, she emphasized, is not going to back down.

“I just think they did us a favor,” Williams said of the county attorney’s ruling, “because now people are really mad.”