Issues Paper, Central Utah Project

Page 167

/Go Board of County Commissioners of Salt Lake County April 3, 1978 Page seven by placing emphasis on the highly desirable units of the project, eliminating unnecessary features, and removing any commitment to Salt Lake County, if, as I assert, Salt Lake County is potentially water independent. The resources to be developed by the Project could go to fill the demands of the farmers in Carbon and Emery Counties, the domestic needs of Duchesne County, the needs for development of electricity in the Uintah Basin or to fulfill the obligations to our Indian citizens. The total supply situation for the State demands that Salt Lake County not be encouraged to import additional water while it's own supplies go under-utilized, and other areas of the State lose agriculture, restrain growth, or import energy because of inadequate supplies of water. In short, the needs of the State as a whole should be considered by I putting water where the demands are greatest rather than where | existing supplies go wasted. The knowledge obtained from recent hydrologic studies should be coupled with the flexibility of the CUP in order to improve efficiencies statewide, rather than ignored in order to promote inefficiencies locally. A major objective of water resources planning should be the exploration of new understandings and new technological achieve­ments so that planned development, management, and construction activities do not degenerate into liabilities due to a lack of responsiveness to change. The failure to use the improved under­standing of water resources of Salt Lake County and the new tech­nologies becoming available for water use, reclamation and reuse, threatens to turn the asset of the CUP into a liability for the people of Salt Lake County and the people of the truly water scarce and arid regions of the State. The purpose of this report is to point out some of the options available for insuring a supply of adequate quantity and quality for the growth predicted to occur in the County. III. WATER FUTURES Sound water resources planning can be divided into three basic steps: A. Determination of current and future needs; B. Appraisal of all possible means to meet those needs; and C. The selection of the most economic approaches for satisfying the the anticipated requirements.