Utah Agency Using Financial Misinformation & Subterfuge to Dry Up the Great Salt Lake
A proposed new income tax in your water bill is the first step to creating a new water development agency in Utah to advance a massive new water diversion that will dry up the Great Salt Lake. Utah legislators are working to force struggling taxpayers to pay the first of three new taxes to expand state government to construct the death knell on the Great Salt Lake: proposed Bear River Development.
The Division of Water Resources commissioned a study outlining several new tax sources on water bills to create “a UDOT for water” that would advance large water projects – most notably proposed Bear River Development. The Division, which is the sponsor of Bear River Development, has been justifying this tax with frightening claims about a “$1.2 billion annual water spending need” in Utah.
This $1.2 billion figure is an imaginary number devised by the water development industry to be a Trojan Horse for Bear River Development — the project to divert up to 30% of the Bear River to the lawns of the Wasatch Front. Utahns have been misled into believing the state is not building Bear River Development, even though Governor Cox’s administration is fully advancing this project.
The dry bed of the Great Salt Lake. Financial disinformation from the Utah water lobby is threatening this irreplaceable ecosystem as we speak.
The Division’s water infrastructure study – which ironically has no water infrastructure projects listed to support this $1.2 billion water spending need – cost $170,000 to taxpayers. Not only does the study fail to list any water infrastructure projects, it does not consider the billions of dollars in current revenues Utahns pay for water.
Over the last six months, the Great Salt Lake Waterkeeper analyzed 76 Utah water and sewer suppliers’ publicly available financial statements. Through this analysis, we found that the Division wholly ignored nearly $800 million in annual net revenues in Utah’s water sector to fabricate a frightening spending “need” to justify raising taxes on your water bills. All so that they can expand their own agency with a new office to build Bear River Development and destroy the Great Salt Lake.
You can see KSL’s courageous coverage of this farce here: