Should Utah Lake get dredged as proposed by a company hoping to build a network of artificial islands, it would jeopardize Salt Lake County residents’ access to clean drinking water from Wasatch canyons, according to several water managers.
Water managers are worried that a plan to dredge Utah Lake could compromise Wasatch Front water-users’ access to drinking water.
That’s because municipal water providers, such as Salt Lake City, have exchanged their rights to Utah Lake’s low-quality water for the pure snowmelt flowing from the canyons, although irrigators hold the senior rights to the melt, according to Mike DeVries, general manager for theIf these water providers can’t deliver Utah Lake water to irrigators, the municipalities would forfeit their access to water from the Cottonwood, Parleys and City Creek canyons.
Still, water managers suspect they would have no recourse but to replace the Utah Lake station’s pumps with an entirely different type, capable of raising water higher, and a canal would have to be dredged for miles into the lake to access deeper water. LRS has claimed that its project would increase Utah Lake’s storage capacity 40% or by an impressive 386,000 acre-feet. But that means nothing to the water providers that rely on the lake to service the needs of hundreds of thousands of Utahns., the lead permitting agency for the project and its publicity materials, LRS claims the project would safeguard the existing water rights associated with the lake. However, nowhere do these documents explain how the dredging project would do it.
“Water users for us are among the most important stakeholders in this whole project,” said LRS president Jon Benson in response to the water managers’ concerns. Benson noted that if his project can’t deliver on those promises, it cannot be approved, so guardrails are in place to protect existing water users’ vital interests., with billboards posted along Interstate 15, extolling the project’s benefits. One shows a person riding a JetSki over blue water free of the algal blooms that have long plagued the lake.
When the lake level rose during big spring runoffs, it sometimes inundated the eastern and northern shores, threatening farmers’ livelihoods. Utah Valley farmers wanted the lake to flow freely down the Jordan so it wouldn’t flood their land, while Salt Lake Valley farmers wanted to store spring runoff in Utah Lake for use in summer.
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