SALT LAKE CITY — Gov. Spencer Cox recently stood on the edge of Farmington Bay, surrounded by some of Utah’s most wealthy and powerful people. He announced a goal — get the Great Salt Lake to a healthy level by 2034.
Specifically, the governor said he would like to see the lake rise to 4,198 feet above sea level. That’s the minimum level for the lake to be considered “healthy.” The coalition Great Salt Lake Rising pledged to raise $100 million from the business and philanthropic community to help with lake recovery efforts. Ducks Unlimited also pledged $100 million in conservation projects.
The south arm of the lake sits at 4,191. It will need to rise seven feet to meet the governor’s target.
“Together we really are going to make the Great Salt Lake great again,” Cox said at the time.
But what will it take to get the Great Salt Lake to a “healthy level”? The Great Salt Lake Collaborative spoke with some of the stakeholders in the effort to see what we need to do.
The following is a Q & A with them. Some questions and answers have been condensed for clarity.
Q: Is 4,198 feet the right goal?
Tim Hawkes, chairman of the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council and chairman of the board at the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative:
“It's probably the wrong metric. What we really want to get to is a healthy lake. … Is the lake keeping the dust down? Is it there for industry and recreation in the way that we need it to be? …
“Let's just imagine we have a massive wet cycle. We get to 4,198 but we don't change the drivers that got the lake to a harmful place and to an unhealthy place in the first place. Well, that's kind of an artificial victory.
“Let's say that we hit an extreme dry cycle for the next five years. And we've moved heaven and earth. We've done every bit of conservation we could possibly do, every bit of innovation we could possibly do, massive investments. But we hit 4,196. There's a risk that somebody then says, ‘Oh, 4,196 you're two feet short. You failed, state of Utah.’
“Whether we failed depends on whether the lake is meeting its benefits or uses. Is it healthy and functioning and sustainable?”
Josh Romney, President of The Romney Group, a real estate investment company, and chairman of Great Salt Lake Rising:
“Having a goal by the Olympics is actually really exciting for me. We don't want the world showing up at our doorstep and coming here to ski and seeing that we have poor snow conditions and seeing that we have an ecological disaster in our own backyard. We want the world to come here and see that we have saved the first saline lake that's gone into decline. We've done something no one else has ever done, that's what we want the world to see.”
Brian Steed, Great Salt Lake Commissioner:
“I think the question is, how do we get the lake to healthy? … Changing the trajectory on the lake and getting it back to more healthy salinity levels, and covering up some of those dust hot spots, that can happen at 4,195. And I think we’ve got to start to pivot a little bit on how we talk about this. It's not just an arbitrary level. It’s trying to get the lake healthier and what it’s going to take to get it healthier.”
Brigham Daniels, co-director of the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah and director of the Great Salt Lake Project, which develops legal and policy solutions for saving the lake.
“4,198 is aggressive, and that's exactly what we need to be doing. We fully support the governor's goal and the commitment that he made in the charter, and we think that with the right level of investment and the right policy tweaks, it is aggressive, but it is achievable.”
Q: How much additional water is needed to meet the goal?
David Tarboton, Utah State University professor of water resources engineering and member of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, which advises lawmakers on how to help the lake:
“The additional inflow needed to achieve a goal of [4,198] feet in about nine or 10 years is about 800,000 acre feet per year. To put that in context, the total inflows to the Great Salt Lake are about [2.1 million] acre feet per year. So the additional 800,000 would be actually more than half, approaching two thirds, of the flow just if you're just looking at the Bear River itself, and it'd be more than the flow in either the Weber or the Jordan rivers at present. … The amount of belt tightening [needed] is pretty big. It's about 40 percent.”
Ben Abbott, professor of ecosystem ecology at Brigham Young University, and the director of the lake advocacy organization Grow the Flow:
“This commitment to restore the lake by the Olympics is absolutely momentous. It's going to take an immense amount of water. The lake behind me today has about 8.3 million acre feet of water in it. To get to that healthy level, that's an additional 5 million acre feet of water. We've got to think of adding about a million acre feet of water a year between now till we get to the Olympics.
“That translates into 30 to 50 percent decrease in how much water we're consuming. And that, for some people, it really makes your eyes widen and you say, is that even possible? How could we cut 30 to 50 percent? But what we've seen is that cities, farmers and industry are able to achieve this in really rapid order. …
“This is our legacy. This is what we're leaving for our grandchildren. This is how we're going to be judged in the eyes of the world, come the Olympics.”
Q: What will individual Utahns need to do differently for the lake to reach a healthy level?
Abbott: “Some sectors can reduce their consumption very easily. The sector where it's the easiest is the Kentucky Bluegrass sector. We have new [low-water] varieties of grass. We're over watering what we do have right now. For very low cost, Utahns can save money on their water bill and help restore Great Salt Lake. So my bet is we're going to see more than a 50 percent decrease in water consumption in that urban rural development sector. …
“It used to be that you got harassed by your neighbors if your lawn wasn't green enough. Now you get questions if it's too green, and people are saying, ‘Hey, why are you using that much water?’ So we've already, I think, in the public, crossed a tipping point where people realize we don't want to be using our most precious resource just on decorations.”
Steed: “People have to start to realize that their personal choices matter in the municipal and industrial setting. … There's great studies that show that people traditionally over water their laws by about 30 percent. If you cut that back by just 30 percent, that's over 100,000 acre feet of water that gets us not all the way, but it gets us a long ways towards some of those levels that we really need to start getting that big infusion of water to stabilize the lake and start bringing it back up.”
Beth Parker, law professor at the University of Utah and co-director of the Great Salt Lake Project:
“We are working with a lot of municipalities, and we're seeing some really great innovations. … Bluffdale is actually a really great example of a city that has leaned heavily into water conservation, partnering with Utah Water Ways and really leaning into programs like Flip your Strip. Sandy City is also really innovative when it comes to water conservation and providing some funding for city members to be able to make some of these changes if they want. And they do draw on some state funding for this too. And then Salt Lake City is also a real innovator when it comes to conservation as well. Salt Lake City, in fact, has a seed program where, if you want to buy water wise seeds to re-sod your lawn and maybe take out your Kentucky Blue Grass.”
Q: What policies or laws will need to change for the lake to reach a healthy level?
Steed: “We're going to have to be engaged in a meaningful conversation with agriculture and how we can find win-win solutions, and whether that's through leasing saved water that's been saved through agricultural water optimization projects, or whether that means engaging in active leasing or other means, I think that that's a conversation we start to have to have as a state.”
Parker: “We think that there's a significant opportunity to provide some streamlining so the money can really talk, and we can fill the lake with water. … We envision something as easy as a three by five card that you see in irrigation companies, and willing water users can lease. If they want to sell, they can sell water to the lake.”
Daniels: “What needs to be available is that when cities decide to conserve that there is a fund to pay for the water that is conserved to get to the lake.”
Abbott: “They're going to be a lot of efforts that are a real sprint, things that are emergency measures that we only see for a few years. These are things that the governor has discussed before, like emergency releases from reservoirs. We're also going to see long term shifts in what our landscapes look like in cities, in rural areas as well.
“The state has to be coordinating with Idaho, Wyoming and the federal government. This is an issue where about a third of the water consumption is happening outside of the state. …
“The legislature this last session took a great step, requiring cities to implement tiered water pricing. The reality is we're still underpaying for our water. We need to incentivize people to conserve water. Likewise, we want to reward cities, farmers, industries that are in the lead here. If you're a city trying to balance your budget instead of raising taxes, if you can cut back your water, then you're going to get money to make sure that water gets to the lake. There really is an opportunity here for this to shore up city budgets, to support our farmers who are struggling.”
Romney: “We need to make sure as we're looking at conservation that cities aren't looking and saying, ‘Hey, we just saved 50 percent of our water. Let's now reallocate it so we can build more and develop more.’
“Every time we save water, we need to make sure that water actually makes it to the lake. As we're working with developers and other people who are doing residential development, there are incredibly water wise ways to build yards. All those things can be done in a way that actually decreases the amount of water that’s being used as development grows. …
“I actually think development, growth can happen at the same pace and we can increase it. We just have to be really wise about how we're using the water and how it's being developed.”
Q: Is the $100 million commitment by Great Salt Lake Rising enough?
Romney: “We are a long way off from being able to refill the lake without having state, federal, private philanthropy all really coming together. This is a huge lift. We're about to do something that's never been done anywhere in the world, and that's to help refill a saline lake. …
“This is a $5 [billion] to $10 billion problem. $100 million is really just going to barely scratch the surface, but it allows us to start to make those investments that allow us to really be able to bring in the big dollars.”
Daniels: “The amount of money that we're talking about isn't extremely different than the kinds of investments that we put into things like I-15 all the time. This isn't an impossible sum of money, but what it's going to take is the right team that's trying to figure out how to get that money.”
Q: How will the $100 million be spent?
Romney: “Number one is public awareness. We need people to understand how important this is. … Every single person in Utah has to come together and do their part to try and conserve and bring the lake back. … It's not that we have to completely revolutionize our lifestyles and go into a desert landscape look like Las Vegas. We just have to live within our means. We have to cut back. We all have to conserve. Everyone has to do their part. …
“[Eliminating] phragmites … that’s another couple 100,000 acre feet of water that we can get after right away.
“We are going to have to start buying water rights … at fair market value, for people who are willing to sell. There's already people that want to sell and people that want to buy. It's just creating a mechanism to be able to do that.”
Hawkes: “The largest and single most important thing that can be done with it is leasing water rights or securing water rights to actually carry down to Great Salt Lake, empowering these programs where people voluntarily can contribute, and that water actually makes it to the lake.”
Q: Why is this effort happening now, when the lake has been declining for years?
Romney: “I think, like a lot of Utahns, I felt like the legislature had done a phenomenal job, and we'd had those incredible years of water, we had two, basically three years of snow in two years, and I had expected the lake was actually in a healthy situation.
“And then when I saw this year that we had 100% snowpack, and the lake actually dropped three feet, I kind of panicked as a resident of the state saying I thought 100% snowpack meant the lake stayed still or came up. But no, 100% snowpack means the lake is going to continue to drop. We need 130% snowpack to keep the lake filling, and that's not something we can count on.
“I just started thinking about my family and the legacy I want to leave them, and I want my kids to be able to live in the state. I want them to be able to enjoy the same things I've been able to enjoy in the state. And so I felt just a huge responsibility to bring together the business community, to create awareness and really help drive this thing forward.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox recently set a goal to raise the Great Salt Lake by seven feet to 4,198 by the time Utah hosts the 2034 Winter Olympics. The Great Salt Lake Collaborative will be covering all of the developments as politicians, philanthropists, residents, businesses, farmers and industry confront what advocates agree is a monumental task.
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This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake—and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
