Kevin O’Leary admits he ‘screwed up’ initial rollout of Box Elder County data center

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — After agreeing to scale down the Stratos Project data center in Box Elder County, Kevin O’Leary is admitting that he ‘screwed up’ the initial rollout of the plans and saying that he should have addressed environmental concerns from the beginning.

After agreeing to the demands in the letter sent by Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, including a 75% reduction in size of developed land, Kevin O’Leary sat down for another interview with ABC4.com’s chief political correspondent Lindsay Aerts.

“Here’s what I think now at this point, I think the two of us (O’Leary and Adams) really screwed this up initially,” O’Leary said. “That’s what I think. I think we made huge mistakes. We made some assumptions that were just not right.”

He said that he was not expecting this kind of intense blowback from the public, and instead, he thought people would be excited that he would be investing $15 billion in the local economy.

“We really screwed it up,” he said. “We pissed off a lot of people, and that’s not the way I do business. That’s not.”

He didn’t go as far as to apologize for the way this has played out, but he said that the best thing he can do now for the people of Box Elder County is to do exactly what he is doing now in responding and conceding to the demands from Adam’s letter.

“I care about the people of Box Elder. I mean, they’re my partners in this because I want to employ a bunch of them, thousands of them, and there’s 66,000 people there, and I want to pay taxes there,” he said. “And I want to be a contributor to the community there and build something I’m very proud of, and I want them to be proud of it too, so the only way to do that is for me to communicate the process transparently.”

O’Leary added that he’s now taking a step he’s never done before: personally taking over communications for this project. He said that he doesn’t want anybody speaking on his behalf.

“The permitting process is transparent. All the plans are going to be transparent. All the design is going to be transparent,” he said. “Everything we do is going to be transparent because I I’m not happy with where we’re at right now. I don’t I don’t like being beaten up like this. It’s not who I am, and I’m very unhappy about it.”

When asked about O’Leary’s comments, Brenna Williams with the Box Elder Accountability Referendum (BEAR) group told ABC4.com, “I think they’ve mastered performance art, is what I think has happened.”

Williams also said that she just doesn’t understand why O’Leary is pushing for the project to be in Box Elder. “There are places who really want this project. For him to be fighting so hard to put it here, seems kind of ridiculous because there are places who really want it,” she said. “I’m not so sure he’d get the same tax concessions as he got in Utah, but he could try. And they would open their arms to him and be grateful for the opportunity. In Box Elder, we don’t want it.”

Most of the land O’Leary has removed from the project area was land next to the Springs Waterfowl Management Area, but Williams said that’s not enough to protect the birds. “What he doesn’t understand is Box Elder County is just too vulnerable for a project of the scale of any kind out in that area. It just won’t work and still preserve the bird refuge in the migratory flyways,” she said.

Additionally, O’Leary revealed that the federal government is a potential tenant for the data center, and it will likely be multiple agencies. He said that it also will be related to national security, and he hopes that Utah can be a contributor to national security.

“Everybody’s interested in Utah, all of them, so I had a talk to all of them,” he said.
O’Leary confirmed that the total acreage of the project area is being decreased by roughly half, and the land that will be developed has been decreased by 75%, per the requests in the letter sent by Senate President Stuart Adams.

“Last night in Washington, I read the letter to everybody in the industry and said, you know what, this letter is demand letter. Tells all of us in this room that we’ve done an incredibly bad job. That was basically my keynote that we have been vilified because it’s our own mistake. […] I said, Adams is right. We should have answered all this stuff up front, now I got to do it after everybody’s been pissed off.”

Williams agreed that developers should have been transparent from the beginning.

“If they had talked to us in the beginning, they would have known how we felt and there wouldn’t have been all this drama and the project could have gone someplace else and saved all the time and energy and probably money trying to come to Box Elder County,” she said. “And if he had investigated the county at all, he would have known the problems that exist here.”