MIDA's seven-member board has to disclose its conflicts of interest every year. The people actually running its individual project areas, on five separate subsidiary boards, mostly don't have to disclose anything at all — and MIDA's own website says so, in plain language.
Nobody hid this. It's on MIDA's own website, in the same paragraph that lists the board members' names. The gap isn't a secret — it's just not the kind of thing anyone reads twice.
MIDA's board-members page carries two sentences, unremarkable in placement, that describe the entire structure this piece is about:
"Board members of public infrastructure districts are not required to file a disclosure if a district's annual budget is less than $10 million. Board members of development review committees are not required to file a disclosure."
midaut.org/board-members, citing Utah Code §67-16-3(16)
MIDA runs an eight-member board — seven voting, one nonvoting — that does have to disclose. But the board doesn't run the individual project areas directly. It created five separate Public Infrastructure Districts and two Development Review Committees to do that, and populated them with its own people. Those bodies are where the granular decisions actually happen — and per MIDA's own stated rule, most of the people on them don't have to say what else they're connected to.
Five names account for nearly every seat across MIDA's subsidiary boards. Two of them — Gary Harter and Mike Ostermiller — sit on literally everything.
What those three numbers mean, by name: Gary Harter (Executive Director, Utah Dept. of Veterans & Military Affairs) holds 6 seats — the main MIDA board plus all five PID boards (MMV, GAEC, MVP, JMARA, Cormont). Mike Ostermiller (KKOS law firm partner) holds the identical 6 — main board plus all five PIDs. Derek Brenchley, MIDA's own Chief Operating Officer, isn't on the main board at all, but sits on 4 of the 5 PID/DRC bodies: the Mountain Village PID, the Golf and Equestrian Center PID, the Cormont PID, and the Military Recreation Facility Development Review Committee.
| Main Board | MMV PID (Deer Valley) | GAEC PID | MVP PID | JMARA PID | Cormont PID | MRF DRC | Falcon Hill DRC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gary Harter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Mike Ostermiller | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Erik Rowland | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Derek Brenchley (MIDA COO) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Kurt Krieg (Extell employee) | ✓ | ✓ |
Note on the Falcon Hill DRC column: it shows no checkmarks here on purpose, not by omission — none of the five overlapping names in this table sit on that committee. Its seven members (Ariana Farber, Michael Eggett, Rick Grover, Brad McIlrath, Jeff Oyler, Steven Parkinson, Hope Thompson) are a fully separate roster with no overlap onto any other MIDA board, which is itself part of the picture: a body with real approval power, made up entirely of names that never show up anywhere else in this structure.
What these are: MMV PID = Mountain Village Public Infrastructure District (Deer Valley/Jordanelle expansion) · GAEC PID = Golf and Equestrian Center Public Infrastructure District · MVP PID = Mountain Veterans Program Public Infrastructure District (near Sundance) · JMARA PID = Jordanelle Marina Recreation Area Public Infrastructure District · Cormont PID = Cormont Public Infrastructure District · MRF DRC = Military Recreation Facility Development Review Committee · Falcon Hill DRC = Falcon Hill Development Review Committee (Hill Air Force Base-adjacent). A Public Infrastructure District (PID) can issue bonds and levy taxes to pay for infrastructure; a Development Review Committee (DRC) reviews and approves individual project applications.
Rows shown are the people who sit on more than one MIDA-family board. Each PID and DRC has additional single-seat members not shown here — the point isn't that everyone overlaps, it's that the people who do overlap sit at the center of nearly every board at once.
Harter and Ostermiller hold the identical set of six seats. Their own signed 2026 disclosure forms describe that role two different ways.
His own words: "Board Member, Military Installation Development Authority and five Public Infrastructure Districts associated with MIDA (unpaid)."
His own form describes the same role as paid consulting work, with staff access — not the unpaid volunteer framing Harter uses for the identical seats.
Neither disclosure is hidden or incomplete — both are filed, both are on the record, both describe what appears to be the same structural role. What differs is compensation, disclosed honestly by both men, in their own words, on the same form, for the same board.
Harter's form also answers, in his own sworn words, the question of what the role actually does:
"As a board member, for MIDA, its associated PIDs, the Utah Defense Alliance and the Timpanogos Valley Theater, I participate in oversight of the operations and in the case of MIDA and its five PIDS, I participate in the approval for issuing bonds."
Gary Harter, MIDA 2026 Disclosure Statement, signed 1/26/2026
MIDA's board doesn't file through one shared process. Every one of the eight voting members plus the nonvoting seat has their own 2026 disclosure on record, and no two tell quite the same story.
Five distinct disclosure regimes across nine people, governed by different local and state rules, applied to people who all sit on the same board. Shepherd's blank form is read here from a document capture rather than the physical original; the source is a clean, non-scanned PDF, which makes a reading error less likely than on the scanned forms, but it hasn't been independently checked against the county's own posted copy. Moss's additional board seats (beyond GOEO and Nucleus) are read from handwriting that isn't fully legible and shouldn't be treated as confirmed without a clearer copy.
The section above compares what each person's form says against what the other eight say. This section goes a step further: it checks two of those nine forms — Rowland's and Froerer's — directly against Utah's own business registry, county commission minutes, and each man's own public professional profile, to see whether what's on the form matches what's on the record.
Erik Rowland
Rowland's Jan. 2, 2026 form — the same one covered above, checked "no conflict," every line blank — is also the disclosure he submitted specifically for his MIDA seat. Utah's own business registry, alongside his own public professional profile, shows five things that form doesn't mention:
The form's spouse section is also blank. Independent public records — a Wasatch County School District staff directory and a separate identity-matched public records aggregator — connect a Moana Rowland to Erik Rowland; the disclosure form does not name a spouse at all.
Gage Froerer
Froerer's disclosure history spans more than a decade of Utah House and Weber County filings. Checked against the same registry, several entities move on and off the record in ways worth laying out plainly.
His stated 16% trust interest and an earlier-reported 3.3% personal stake are the same underlying interest described two different ways — a 20% share in a family trust that itself holds 16% of NVLA works out to roughly 3.3% of NVLA personally — not a contradiction between two different numbers.
Several of Froerer's other public-body seats — the Utah Counties Indemnity Pool and the Northern Utah Economic Alliance among them — are confirmed, on the record, as roles that come with being the sitting Weber County Commissioner: the full commission voted him into the Indemnity Pool seat in open session, and NUEA's own materials describe its chairmanship as shared between the sitting Weber and Davis county commissioners. Those are a different kind of finding from the entities above and aren't treated the same way here.
None of this happened without the Governor's knowledge. Gov. Spencer Cox's own public statements, tracked across eight months, form a complete arc from personally soliciting the project to disclaiming any role in it at all.
Stated plainly: in January, his own side asked the investor "can you do it?" In April, he called caution about the project "the dumbest thing ever." By August, he says the decision "was not made by me," claims years of quiet concern about the very authority that made it, and wishes he had the power to impose the same caution he'd dismissed four months earlier.