Every tax MIDA now levies inside its own project-area PIDs traces back to one 2021 bill — the one that also carved out a conflict-of-interest exception and shielded MIDA from open meetings and records law, years before anyone was watching.
By 2021, MIDA had existed for fourteen years. This is the bill that quietly gave it the specific financial tool — a taxing PID subsidiary — that every subsequent MIDA-area tax finding in this investigation runs through, plus a set of exceptions to conflict-of-interest, open meetings, and public records law that got almost no attention at the time.
S.B. 233, "Military Installation Development Authority Amendments," 2021 General Session. Chief Sponsor Sen. Jerry W. Stevenson; House Sponsor Rep. Val L. Peterson. Tap a card for why each provision matters.
Two different senators built this in two steps a year apart: McCay opened the door, Stevenson gave what walked through it the power to tax. Neither the 2019 nor 2020 predecessor bills appear to have drawn significant public attention at the time — both passed as fairly technical-sounding PID framework bills.
Passed the Senate Business and Labor Committee with a favorable recommendation, 4–0–5, February 26, 2021. Passed the Senate floor 27–0. Final Passage in the House, 3rd Reading, March 5, 2021 at 11:20 AM: 67 yeas, 1 nay, 7 absent or not voting. The lone House no vote was Rep. Petersen, M. (The House vote's own record header labels it a "Senate 3rd Reading," but le.utah.gov's own floor audio index confirms Day 45, March 5, 2021, as House Floor Audio with House Sponsor Val Peterson presenting — the header label is a tracking-system artifact.) Signed by the Governor March 22, 2021; effective the same day. Session Law Chapter 414.
The taxing power this bill created isn't theoretical — at least two MIDA-created Public Infrastructure Districts are actively using it, with real budgets and bonds behind them.
MIDA Mountain Village Public Infrastructure District — the PID covering the Deer Valley East Village/Jordanelle expansion. Its original Designation Resolution and Assessment Ordinance were adopted February 26, 2021 — the same day this bill cleared the Senate Business and Labor Committee. The district approved a $274 million tentative budget for fiscal year 2026 (May 13, 2025). It has since amended its assessment areas multiple times (2025 resolutions on Assessment Areas #1 and #2), and its board includes Kurt Krieg — an Extell employee — alongside MIDA officials Gary Harter, Nicole Cottle, and Mike Ostermiller.
MIDA Mountain Veterans Program Public Infrastructure District — a separate PID that issued Tax Allocation Revenue Bonds (Series 2024) explicitly secured by, among other pledged revenue, "District Property Tax Revenues." The bond proceeds funded an inn, townhomes, a day lodge, and a maintenance structure — ski-resort infrastructure consistent with the Military Recreation Facility project area near Mayflower/Sundance.
MIDA's own board has also indicated interest in developing nuclear power and AI data center capacity within its Utah National Guard project area (27 combined UTNG properties) — approving a $16.5 million loan for related work at Camp Williams, including a facility tied to uranium enrichment equipment manufacturing. Whether that project area's own PID has separately invoked the S.B. 233 property tax authority hasn't been confirmed here.
Despite expanding MIDA's taxing, public-infrastructure-district, and public-private-partnership powers — and creating exceptions involving meetings, records, and conflicts of interest — S.B. 233 received almost no substantive contemporaneous mainstream news coverage this Hive could locate. It passed the Senate 27–0 and the House 67–1 before Gov. Cox signed it. That's not "the media never covered it" — unindexed print, broadcast, or archived reporting may exist — but a search of major Utah outlets came up nearly empty. Worth remembering the bill passed in the middle of a still-active pandemic, when legislative coverage broadly thinned out statewide.
The one mainstream mention found: a Fox 13 roundup of bills Gov. Cox signed that legislative session listed S.B. 233 as one item among dozens, with no explanation of its taxing, transparency, or public-private-partnership provisions.
The most detailed contemporaneous discussion came from an advocacy source, not a newsroom: the Utah Conservation Community's February 28, 2021 legislative update opposed the bill, describing it as giving MIDA additional "power and secrecy." It specifically flagged the same four provisions documented on this page — the taxing-power change, the conflict-of-interest exception, and the open-meetings and records exceptions — plus a related $45.6 million budget allocation it said supported infrastructure tied to the military project and the resort. That characterization should be read as the organization's own advocacy framing, not a neutral account — but its description of the bill's actual provisions matches the enrolled legislation.
Real scrutiny came later, and aimed at the broader pattern rather than this bill specifically. A December 2023 Salt Lake Tribune investigation, republished by KPCW, found Senate President Stuart Adams and Sen. Jerry Stevenson — MIDA's chair and vice chair — had together received roughly $112,500 in donations connected to Extell owner Gary Barnett since 2018, nearly three-quarters of it going to Adams directly or PACs he leads. Adams had already accepted almost $30,000 of that money by the time he and Barnett posed together at the Mayflower groundbreaking in June 2021 — three months after this bill passed. The same reporting found Stevenson had introduced a dozen bills tweaking MIDA statute across his 14 legislative sessions, changes he said made MIDA "tremendously effective": "I don't think we envisioned some of the things that have taken place... the laws governing MIDA had to be adjusted."
MIDA's own executive director, Paul Morris, told lawmakers at a 2022 interim committee meeting that Extell "read the MIDA law and they said there's no way we can make that work without using the MIDA resources" — and Extell's own VP of development, Brooke Hontz, echoed it to the Tribune: Barnett "wouldn't even consider coming to Utah without the MIDA jurisdiction." Both Adams and Stevenson, when asked directly, denied the donations influenced their votes. Adams: "Campaign contributions do not impact nor influence any of my decisions or votes." Stevenson: "I don't know that the donation from the Barnetts has been any heavier than it has from other places... I don't think that influences my vote."