Utah Gov. Gary Herbert would probably like to take a firm stand against the cockamamie idea of building a 500-mile pipeline to draw water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to slake the thirst of the rapidly growing Front Range of Colorado. The governor of Wyoming, after all, already has. But, if Herbert marshals the evidence necessary to kill the plan, the collateral damage may be that he would also ruin the cockamamie idea of building a 139-mile pipeline to draw water from Lake Powell to drench the lawns and golf courses of the rapidly growing St. George area of Utah.
This is what happens when a boondoggle project that would benefit developers in another state is held up next to a boondoggle project that would benefit developers in your state. Opposing the first one — angering only people who can’t vote for you anyway — without undermining the second one becomes, well, awkward.
Backers of the proposed Wyco Power and Water Project argue that Flaming Gorge and the Green River that feeds it contain enough Colorado River Basin water to keep their proposed $3 billion pipeline flowing. And they logically warn Herbert and his state water experts that, should Utah argue otherwise, they would implicitly be making the case that other parts of the basin are likewise too short on supply to tolerate massive human interventions in their flow.
Herbert, to his credit, is warming up his anti-Wyco arguments, pledging that “not one drop” of Utah water will be shipped off to Denver, Pueblo and Colorado Springs. But the governor’s line in the water has a big “if” attached to it.
“If there’s not water there, we’ll do everything we can to block it,” Herbert said.
The fact that Herbert’s administration is not simultaneously trying to pre-empt the Lake Powell Pipeline project betrays a highly parochial view of when it is a good idea to reroute massive amounts of water and when it isn’t. It should not be just a matter of when another state’s economy gets the short-term boost out of the long-term burden placed on a region’s water supply.
The reason these things are overseen by federal authorities — in this case, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — is that a broader view is needed. Water drawn from one place affects not only human activities, both urbanization and agriculture, but also fish, animals, plants, the survival of whole ecosystems. The downstream, long-term impact of any such move, factoring in climate change models and human demographics, must be carefully considered.
State lines should not matter.
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