A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune covered the efforts of water managers in the St. George area to cope with the increasing demand.
Washington and Kane counties are growing very fast, and water supplies are already tight. The article described various strategies for dealing with it. They have been somewhat successful with conservation efforts, though water service is still cheap. There are some more aggressive plans, like building a reservoir that will hold treated wastewater which can then be used for irrigation.
Neighbors are objecting to what will be a dry lake bed in August and September, blowing dust laced with whatever went down the drain, and something of an eyesore.
There is the proposed pipeline to pump water from (shrinking) Lake Powell to the area. They are looking at every option out there. Except one. Saying “no.”
The article said the population in the Washington County area is expected to double in 30 years to 450,000 people. The water supply for that can’t come from turning the tap off while you brush your teeth.
Conspicuously absent from the list of options is deciding that doubling the population is a bad idea. Throughout all of Utah’s political system it’s a fundamental principle that growth is not only inevitable, but desirable. Maybe it’s time to question that.
It’s not easy to completely stop growth, at least not without catastrophic consequences. A gigantic toxic waste issue stopped growth in Love Canal pretty effectively. Natural disasters that scrape the landscape clean are definitely deterrents to development. But outside of that kind of thing, which we don’t want or wish on anybody, slowing the rate of growth is hard.
In Utah, we have bigger families than in a lot of the country. So a lot of our growth is what the planners call “natural growth.”
We certainly don’t need government telling us how many kids to have. Can you imagine Utah’s conservative, small-government Legislature involving itself in your personal reproductive matters? Oh, right, they already have, even though family planning decisions shouldn’t be any of government’s business.
Natural growth will happen, and the new generations will be looking for places to live, which means new houses that will need to have water coming out of the taps.
It’s not the natural growth that’s the issue. It’s the unnatural growth. We keep shooting the growth industry full of steroids, recruiting more businesses, figuring out special state financing deals, and accelerating growth any way we can. Inland ports, MIDA, the special state-funding mechanisms for hockey, baseball, the old prison site —i f there’s a spark, the Legislature will find a way to turn it into an explosion.
There is an imbalance in supply and demand in the housing market, with painful consequences for anybody trying to get into a house or rent a livable apartment. There are state efforts to increase the supply. Those efforts seem to be undone by other state efforts to juice growth, pushing up the demand side of it faster than supply can catch up.
At a state policy level, we’re actively making the problem worse. Keeping up with the rate of natural growth is difficult enough. Do we really need to be hyping the demand side of the equation?
There is a lot of water available in the state. The agricultural use is huge, and the cash value of Utah’s farm production isn’t great. We are not the breadbasket of the country.
Drying up the farms and ranches would matter a lot to the owners of the farms, but nobody is going to go to bed hungry if all of Utah’s agricultural production went away and the water moved to culinary use instead of irrigation. The landscape would be radically different, but the green fields are turning into cul-de-sacs of townhomes already. It would be nice if we could slow the pace of that.
Ultimately there are hard physical limits, though we are a long way from hitting the proverbial wall. We can build to Singapore-like density and bathe once a week to accommodate millions more people here before reaching that breaking point. Between where we are now and that dystopian end, there is a lot of wiggle room. Where do we draw the line and say that growth is too fast or too much? We might all draw the line differently.
Locally, it feels like we are banging into the limits in terms of congestion, housing affordability and general “too-much-ness.” But it’s only beginning. The additional growth already approved and under construction along the Wasatch Back will push us well beyond what most of us view as the comfortable capacity. We can redefine our concept of “comfortable,” and then add 30,000 new people on Jordanelle Ridge, and redefine comfort again.
The issue isn’t entirely hard physical limits. There are less defined limits on social, cultural and functional factors. Breaching those limits renders the place unrecognizable as much as paving over the farms. We may reach a point of softly rationing water. Are we ready for soft rationing of the outdoor recreation that has made life in Utah what it is?
It would be nice if, among the planning scenarios considered, saying “no” was at least a tool in the kit. At least we should quit juicing the growth.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.