What’s included in Utah’s new Water Resources Plan
This article is part of a series addressing topics relevant to water security in southwestern Utah. Look for stories online on select Fridays and in print on select Saturdays that feature updates on ongoing water issues, interviews with experts and explorations of how we can ensure a better water future for our growing communities.
This week Wednesday, the Utah Division of Water Resources (DWR) released a public draft of their 2021 Water Resources Plan, the third since 2001. With a stronger focus on recommended actions they can take to secure Utah’s water future, this version highlights three main principles of water management: secure supply, healthy watersheds and reliable data.
In the draft’s forward, Brian Steed, the Executive Director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which includes the DWR, called the 156-page report “more than a drought response plan.” Instead, he presented it as a “planning document that looks 50 years into the future” and “provides a comprehensive look at Utah’s current water use and supply conditions and future demand scenarios.”
The state will accept feedback on the plan from residents between now and November 15th, after which time they will consider each comment and revise the plan accordingly before publishing the final version. The division will also hold a Virtual Open House to discuss the document on October 20 from 7 to 8 p.m. More details on that event and instructions for how to submit a public comment can be found at: http://water.utah.gov/2021waterplan.
In accordance with the complex nature of water issues across the Southwest, there is a lot to digest in this latest plan. Readers interested in participating in the public review process may want to take a look at the document in its entirety. In the meantime, the following are some interesting highlights:
Right off the bat, in the document’s preface, Washington County is singled out as having a particularly uncertain water future:
“Most areas of the state will have adequate water supplies to satisfy growth if Regional Water Conservation Goals are met. However, several areas will need to acquire additional water supplies – most notably Washington County and portions of the Wasatch Front.”
More:The Water Tap: What a St. George water tank project reveals about local priorities
According to Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, the population in Washington County is expected to increase by 229% between 2015 and 2065, compared to a 94% statewide average over that same time period. This growth rate is much higher than the next fastest-growing and another water-insecure county, Wasatch, which is expected to increase by 187%. The population in Iron County will increase by about 80% over those 45 years.
The document reaffirms that the state’s official plan to address this shortage continues to be the Lake Powell Pipeline project, which aims to transport up to 28 billion gallons of water each year — enough for about 150,000 households — from Lake Powell to Sand Hollow Reservoir through a 140-mile buried pipeline. The estimated $2 billion project has been pushed nearly unanimously by state officials for decades, though it faces opposition from environmental groups that argue the drought-stricken Colorado River doesn’t have any water to spare, as well as neighboring states that also rely on its flows.
More:Congress shuts down what activists see as an attempt to fast-track the Lake Powell Pipeline
While the project slowly progresses through the permitting process, controversies linger over whether it is affordable and how it may be affected by current renegotiations of Colorado River shortage sharing guidelines between seven western states. The Water Resources Plan echoes the Washington County Water Conservancy District’s (WCWCD) assertion that Utah’s water rights will prevail and that the project is essential in order to diversify the local water source and reduce reliance on the Virgin River.
With that reliance on the Virgin River and the uncertain status of the Lake Powell Pipeline project in mind, one paragraph from Chapter 6 stands out as somewhat alarming:
“The Santa Clara River and Virgin River flows are fully developed. Washington County residents achieved a 25% water-use reduction by 2015 and have continued to make progress. Reaching the target regional conservation goal will only extend water supplies by two or three years. The addition of approximately 84,000 acre-feet of water from the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline project will delay water shortages.”
More:Survey results: How Washington County residents feel about the Lake Powell Pipeline
When asked for clarification on this last sentence, Karry Rathje, Communications & Government Affairs Manager for the WCWCD responded that:
“Regarding the Lake Powell Pipeline, the project will help Washington County meet its anticipated water demands through 2070 based on the state’s current projected population estimates and water conservation goals.”
Both the new Water Resources Plan and the WCWCD’s mission statement specifically aim to look 50 years into the future, which brings us right to that 2070 date. But still, this potential expiration date for the pipeline as a solution to local water concerns begs the question: what happens after 2070, when Washington County has already grown past 229% and is out of water and out of options?
The part of that paragraph about how reaching conservation goals (not yet reached) will extend our local water supply by two or three years also seems alarming, since the Lake Powell Pipeline is not likely to be completed in the next few years no matter how fast the federal process progresses.
When asked for clarification on this point, Todd Stonely, assistant director at the Utah Division of Water Resources, commented that:
“This does not include emergency measures that can be put in place such as reductions for the drought emergency we are currently experiencing. This statement means that additional water supply in this part of the state is needed within the next several years, unless emergency measures are to become the new norm.”
More:The Water Tap: The complicated picture of southwestern Utah’s tenuous water future
Reductions for the drought emergency could, according to the plan, include advancing turf removal rebate programs, adopting land-use plans that encourage desert-friendly landscaping, optimizing agricultural use by improving technology or converting land to other uses, improving our ability to monitor secondary water use and track water loss and expanding education about water limitations.
Right now, though, some ongoing practices seem at odds with these dire predictions and emergency measures. For example, the division currently posts a weekly watering guide that outlines recommendations for how many times per week residents should water their lawns based on the climate in that part of the state. For Washington and Kane Counties, the latest advice was to water three times a week, more than in any other part of the state. The map illustrating this sits right between a section of the report describing the need to measure water loss and a section describing the need to expand education about water waste. It’s also two pages after the recommendation to expand turf removal rebate programs (which have been floated by WCWCD but not yet finalized) and two pages before the chapter ends by stating that “There’s Work To Do.”
Indeed.
An additional point to consider regarding the water management principle of secure supply may be that the plan assumes a 10-11% reduction in water yield due to climate change. Stonely explained that this estimate comes from a several sources published by various scientists and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
But it’s not a unanimous conclusion. In their sixth white paper published this past February, scientists at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies projected a 3-10% reduction in water availability in the Colorado River Basin per degree Celsius of global warming. With last month’s sixth report on estimated climate change impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting a very likely rise in average temperatures between 1.2 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2060, these sources suggest that water flowing into local watersheds could potentially drop by as much as 30% in the next few decades.
More on Recent Colorado River Studies:The Water Tap: Climate change and climate denial on the Colorado River
Data from the United States Department of Agricultural and the United States Forest Service, unfortunately, support this latter conclusion. Their online mapping tool shows watersheds in southwest Utah colored by their importance and by how much their water yield is likely to decline due to climate change between 2010 and 2040. The watershed named Grapevine Wash-Virgin River is shown in red, with an estimated 55.9% decline in water inflows over that time.
The above relates to the plan’s focal management principles of secure supply and healthy watersheds. The third aims to address the issue of reliable data.
There is definitely a need to improve the public data on our water supply and use. Right now, most of our secondary (untreated) water use by agriculture, for example, is only estimated. And we have fewer monitoring devices on streams and other water sources than many other western states.
Improving water monitoring could also enable Utah to report statistics on per capita water use that are more similar to those used by other western states, which would either exonerate Utahns from accusations of being especially wasteful or help us get on track. As it stands, Utah often refutes claims that our per-person water use is higher than the regional average by simply stating that the measurement methods are different so the numbers just don’t compare, including in this latest Water Resources Plan.
The messy and lacking data we have available to manage our insecure water supply was also evident in the fuzzy math of Cedar City’s 2020 Water Report, which didn’t really seem to be able to put its finger on how much water the city had available, was using, needed or was losing through leaks in the system. See our April 30th story for more on that.
More:The Water Tap: The ups, downs and many numbers of Cedar City’s 2020 Water Report
Useful as it may be to highlight potential concerns, the report does also include a lot of helpful information and some promising action plans that are worth a read (see especially pages 68, 69 and Chapter 10), and that we might cover in more depth in a future Water Tap article. So stay tuned for that, and be sure to exercise your right to submit comments, questions, complaints and compliments to the Utah Department of Natural Resources about their new Water Resources Plan before November 15th.
Comments, questions, complaints and compliments about The Water Tap series can be sent to me at the contact info below. Thanks for reading.
Joan Meiners is the Environment Reporter for The Spectrum & Daily News through the Report for America initiative by The Ground Truth Project. Support her work by donating to these non-profit programs today. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at [email protected].
