Let’s Wade into Utah’s Water Issues

Perhaps the most damning of the misconceptions about water is that water is “easy.” We go to our sink, turn on the tap and water flows out of the faucet. Easy. We do not perceive, at that moment, the energy, time, effort and infrastructure involved in getting the water to our homes and businesses. 

The director of the Utah Division of Water Resource (DWRe), Candice Hasenyager, uses an analogy to explain the challenge of managing water infrastructure, and—due to the complex, interconnected nature of our water systems—it will not be the last analogy we use. “If you hit a pothole, you know there’s a pothole, right?” she says. “Where, if there’s a leak in a pipe, you don’t see it. It takes time to find that leak.” Anyone who has ever had a leaky pipe knows the damage it can cause when left unmanaged. 

This is why the misconception that “water is easy” can be troubling. If we refuse to acknowledge the systems and infrastructure necessary to deliver water, we will certainly not recognize the leaks in that system, let alone address them. Having reliable water, after all, is pretty important. Everyone who participates in the system, all the way down the line from water policy makers to treatment to supply to consumers, has a stake in using water responsibly. 

The Plan for the Great Salt Lake

“The Great Salt Lake is in a water debt crisis. And the reason for that is because we’ve over-diverted the waters upstream for both agricultural and municipal use,” says Zachary Frankel, Executive Director of the Utah Rivers Council, a nonprofit organization that advocates for conservation and sustainability statewide. The threat of the Great Salt Lake’s drying out is arguably the most urgent water matter. Salt Lake magazine and press outlets both local and international have covered the toxic dust and ecological collapse that would result if the lake dries up. Thus, awareness of the threat has risen significantly in recent years. Water elevation, meanwhile, hit an all-time low in November of 2022. Since then, a few exceptionally wet winters, and modifications to the causeway between the north and south arms of the lake, have at least raised the level of the South Arm of the lake. However, relying on the weather is not a sustainable solution.

Frankel is concerned about the lack of attention paid to the water levels of the Great Salt Lake’s North Arm. The North Arm is home to some key ecosystems, like Gunnison Island, which is a crucial rookery for the American white pelican. “Because of these shrinking water levels, Gunnison Island is no longer an island and predators can run to the island,” he says. “If we don’t save Gunnison Island, how are we saving the Great Salt Lake?” 

For too long, we have withdrawn more than our available balance, and, Frankel says, we have not set up a way to pay it back. “If you walked into a bank to buy a house and go, ‘Here’s my down payment, it’s this coffee can of coins.’ The banker’s going to roll their eyes. Because that’s not a borrowing plan,” he explains. And that coffee can of loose change? “That’s what the Utah Legislature is doing for the Great Salt Lake. There is no program requiring any minimum volume of water flow, no goal about what lake elevation we should achieve and no water budget to repay the debt that Utahns owe for over-diverting water upstream for two decades.”

The state does, however, have a plan to make a plan that was funded by the Utah Legislature. The Utah Division of Water Resources released the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan (GSLBIP) in April of this year. The GSLBIP’s purpose is to ensure an ongoing, resilient water supply for the basin. “A project of this scale has not been done within the Great Salt Lake Basin before,” says Hasenyager. “The key step to achieve that goal is to understand how this system is interconnected together.” 

Hasenyager imagines a basket, in which they’re weaving all of the available information, identifying the data gaps and then filling those gaps to provide tools for water projects and an over arching collection of all the data. This “mega model” will encompass the five basins and watersheds in the basin. With this wide-angle view, “we can provide information to legislators and decision-makers and the potential impacts or consequences of those decisions,” she says. 

But will the basket hold water? 

The tools, and the mega model, will be developed over the next two years. Among other projects in the basket, they are meant to provide vital information and guidance for reaching and sustaining a healthy Great Salt Lake.

The historical average elevation for the Great Salt Lake is 4,200 feet. “This is the water level that science indicates is the most sustainable level for all the various interests of the lake—everything from the 330 migratory bird species to recreation to industry, air quality and water quality for the lake,” says Frankel. “So 4,200 is the magic level.”

That would take an inflow of 8 million acre-feet of water. A Herculean goal. “If every man, woman and child in the Great Salt Lake Basin stopped using water for a year, it would still take four years to raise the Great Salt Lake,” says Frankel. Utah will need to reduce all water use by 19% to hit 4,200 feet by 2054.

The Utah Rivers Council created the 4200 Project to outline a way to meet the magic level, including policy changes, such as mandating lake elevation goals and conservation benchmarks; getting surplus agricultural water to the lake by fixing Utah’s Agricultural Water Optimization Program; protecting tributaries from new water diversions; ending the property tax subsidy for water districts; and, of course, fixing leaky pipes to eliminate water waste.

There is no single solution to reach that goal. It requires a wide, coordinated effort at all levels of the system, and that comes from the top. In two years, when the policy recommendations generated from the GSLBIP’s projects, tools and models come to fruition, there is no guarantee the Utah Legislature will adopt those policies. Just this past legislative session, the Utah Rivers Council gave the Utah Legislature a “D-” grade for its handling of water policy. 

“Good legislation at the Utah legislature is consistently defeated,” Frankel says. “It doesn’t even get out of committee. There were eight or ten good bills at that state house that died this year. Same as last year, same as the year before.” One of those bills would have required the DWRe to monitor how
much of the water conserved through public programs (on which the state has spent billions in recent years) reaches the Great Salt Lake.

“We have to stop thinking this is just about facts and data and understand there is a special interest profiting off of upstream water diversions that does not want to deliver water to our rivers and lakes because those are profits lost. We don’t need to study that,” says Frankel.“It’s just basic American business.”

Agriculture Called to Account: Agriculture Water Optimization Program

While guidelines are in place to conserve municipal and industrial (M&I) water; most of the state’s water goes toward agriculture. Thus, the most substantial water gains stand to be made in the agricultural sector. One option is shoring up the state’s Agriculture Water Optimization Program. “The biggest concern is there’s no requirement to deliver any of that saved water to the Great Salt Lake,” explains Frankel. States like Oregon and Washington have a requirement that “if taxpayers are putting the money in, they get a portion of the water saved relative to their investment,” he says. 

The Utah program has provided an estimated $265 million in grants to farmers to upgrade their irrigation systems and improve water use efficiency. While the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food (UDAF) called the program a success, funding hundreds of farmers’ projects, a 2023 audit reported that the program’s success is impossible to measure because of a lack of measurable data. The state audit called on the UDAF to take an accounting of the program and enforce its reporting requirements on all funded projects. Frankel says, “I would argue that if the Great Salt Lake is the measuring stick with which we’re measuring the success of that program, it’s failing.”

Adapting to Climate Change

When I first wrote about water conservation for Salt Lake magazine, most of the state was experiencing significant drought. Now, the Utah Department of Natural Resources reports that “Utah’s water situation is robust,” following two winters of heavy snowfall and higher-than-average rain this past spring. Drastic swings in precipitation are not a result of praying for rain, but the impact of climate change. And dramatic extremes, from severe droughts to record-breaking snowfalls, make the job of managing Utah’s water supply even more challenging. 

“Today, we’re doing great, but if you talked to me two years ago, I would have told you that 99% of the state was in severe and extreme drought and our reservoirs were half full. So, it is dynamic,” says Hasenyager, and our water systems have reservoirs to save water during wet periods for drier times. “But our challenge is, as we are getting these wetter wets and these dryer dries, how do we try to reduce our water use and use our water as wisely as possible to make us more resilient to big extremes?” At the end of the day, the wetter wets will not make up for the dryer dries. Over the long term, increases in precipitation will be overwhelmed by rising temperatures and evaporation.

“We’re simply not adapting to the reality of climate change, all of us, collectively,” says Frankel. He points to Lake Powell, America’s second-largest reservoir, which is at one-third of capacity. 

“We heard from our water conservancy district down in Southern Utah,” Hasenyager says. “They received a call saying, ‘this reservoir is looking low. Can you fill it back up?’ And that’s just not how reservoirs work. Our reservoirs are filled by our snowpack and the runoff and not just for recreation. They’re an important part of our water supply.” But the Colorado River Basin has seen a 20% decline in runoff as a function of climate change.

The Colorado River Basin occupies the eastern and southern parts of Utah, as well as six other states, providing water to 40 million people. It will take far more than the efforts of Utah and other Basin states to reverse the impacts of climate change, but we can do more to be good neighbors and better stewards of the water we share. “We all know we can fight over water,” Frankel says. “The real question is, can we learn to share?”

That fight is playing out right now as the Upper Colorado Basin states face off with the Lower Basin states on how best to save the Colorado River and cut water use by 4 million acre-feet per year. In short, the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) want to cut water sent to the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) while not bearing any of the burden of cuts themselves. The Lower Basin states’ proposal has all states, Upper and Lower, making sacrifices to meet the conservation goal. Both plans use reservoir levels as the trigger for implementing the water cuts. 

It would be tempting to cut every state’s allotment equally, but equality is not the same thing as equity. Frankel says we should ask, “What do we really need?” Currently, Utah draws about 1 million acre-feet of water out of Colorado annually. The Las Vegas Valley has a similar size population but Nevada only pulls about 300,000 acre-feet of water. “Why do two different populations, the same size, have different water-sharing agreements? Why does Nevada get one-third of the water that Utah gets? Are we better? Is it because Nevada is a ‘place of sin?’ These are questions we need to answer.”

State Water Conservation Goals

Utah set regional goals for M&I (Municiapl & Industrial) water conservation in 2019, aiming for 11%– 20% conservation of M&I water by 2030. Previously, M&I per capita water use saw 18% reductions  from 2000–2015. Recent legislative efforts have totaled roughly $500 million for water conservation, says Hasenyager. “We are running as fast as we can to get that money on the ground and start making those efforts.”

Supplying Growth

The challenges brought on by climate extremes feed into other water issues as well. “The kind of extreme nature that we’re dealing with, from a water supply standpoint, makes it more challenging to deal with a growing population,” says Hasenyager. As communities grow, typically, so does water demand…right? Further water diversions, such as the Bear River Development and the Lake Powell Pipeline, have been proposed to meet the projected increase in water demand as some Utah towns top lists for the fastest growth in the nation. 

However, Frankel makes a point that he says often gets lost in the conversation about growth and projected water demand. If you live in an urban area, very little, if anything, needs to be irrigated. Irrigating agricultural land is the top water use in Utah by far. Much of the new development in Utah is taking over land that was once put to agricultural use, but it takes a lot less water to grow people than it does to grow crops. 

“We’re creating a surplus of water when we pave irrigated farmland,” says Frankel. With some changes, we could make do with the water we have without creating more diversions.

A report on Washington County’s water use and the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline observed something similar. The water consultancy Water Demand Management found that the pipeline was unnecessary because Washington County could instead reduce its water use, store excess water from the Virgin River during wetter years for use in dry years, reuse its wastewater and better manage water demand. The report authors suggested that if Washington County used water the same way as in Denver, Albuquerque or Los Angeles, they could continue to grow and still have the local water supply meet their needs. 

Other cities in the West, like Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Phoenix, have found ways to not just conserve water but actually manage water demand, even as they continue to grow. This is called “decoupling.” “The idea is, yes, these populations are growing, but by instituting sustainable water strategies, they can reduce total water demand,” says Frankel. A survey by Colorado Mesa University looked at 20 growing Western cities and found the secret to successful decoupling is reducing per capita water use.

Water Conservation

Water conservation is an integral part of any solution to Utah’s most pressing water issues. Water conservation is also an issue we seem to struggle with on its own. Utahns use more water per capita than people in other states. There’s some contention over exactly how much more because of discrepancies in measuring water use, but according to data from the USGS, Utah had the highest total domestic per capita water use of any state in 2010 and the second highest in 2015. 

Why do Utahns use more water? “We have the cheapest water rates in the United States,” says Frankel. “And that’s a really disturbing observation for a lot of reasons…We can’t care about water and simultaneously value it like it doesn’t matter.” When water is cheap, we use more of it. But, with water rate increases, water use drops by as much as about 20%, according to a Utah State University study. Utah Rivers Council advocates for a change in the pricing structure for outdoor water use, which would charge outdoor use at a higher rate while maintaining lower rates for indoor use. They argue that if water suppliers stopped collecting property taxes to subsidize water rates,
and replaced the lost revenue by raising outdoor water rates, consumers would use less water and water suppliers would
not be worse off financially.

It’s possible our struggle to cut back on our water use is tied to the troubling misconception that water is “easy.” Why else would it be so cheap? Because of that, “We’re not holding ourselves accountable for saving water,” says Frankel. “We turn a blind eye to water waste.”  

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