To preserve the Great Salt Lake, Utah environmental groups, including Grow the Flow, are lobbying state leaders to pass bills that support the Great Salt Lake Strategic Plan.
Lead Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed and Deputy Commissioner Tim Davis developed the plan, and it was approved by Governor Spencer Cox in the end of 2023.
“It's high level, but it has three different types of actions: short term actions, which were last year in 2024; medium term actions, which are over the next five years; and then long-term actions that over the next 30 years that the state needs to take in order to get the lake back to a healthy range,” Davis said.
Grow the Flow is a volunteer group that is working to spread awareness of the Great Salt Lake’s health. They will lobby the Utah Legislature until Feb. 27 in support of bills that will save and restore the lake.
“People are looking for community and that's what we're really trying to provide them with: the opportunity to get together with people to care about the same cause,” Jake Dreyfus, the managing director for Grow the Flow, said.
The Department of Environmental Quality had a budget request to expand monitoring of Great Salt Lake dust storms, Davis said.
“It'll continue to take a lot more work for us to get the lake back to a healthy range,” he said. “It's not going to be fast and so we have a lot more work to do, but I'm optimistic that we can get the lake over the medium term, stabilize it and then get it over the long term and get it back to a healthy range.”
Jake Serago is a water resource engineer with the Division of Water Resources. He has worked on creating models for the plans at Bear River Basin and worked on models for Idaho and Wyoming.
“We put all of these models together so that we can develop a water resources plan for the entire Great Salt Lake Basin, which had never been done before. So, we submitted a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation and won a Basin Study Grant,” Serago said.
The division received money from the Utah legislature to conduct a watershed assessment, Serago added.
“It's going to take time because of the nature of the hydrology, and it took us decades to get to the position where we are today,” Serago said. “So, it's an interesting situation, but I think we're giving it the attention and everything that's needed right now so that we can do that work to set us up for a future trajectory.”
To view the strategic plan, visit the Great Salt Lake website here.