SALT LAKE CITY – The Utah Rivers Council is calling for an audit of the Utah Division of Water Resources, citing mismanagement and inconsistent or dishonest data reporting.
Utah Rivers Council officials claim the division is inflating water use to create a false need for expensive and unnecessary water development. They said the division claimed every Utahn uses an average of 295 gallons of water each day, and when Utah’s high use was criticized it adjusted that number to 167.
Zach Frankel is the executive director of Utah Rivers Council, and he said better documentation and an audit are necessary.
“There are not two sets of numbers,” he said. “There’s only one number. Either it’s 295, or 167 or it’s something else, but we can’t just make it up. You can’t go into a bank and keep making up your income during the course of conversation. You have to document it, and that’s what we need to do now with this audit is document our water use.”
