- [Reporter] On this episode of "The Hinckley Report," after another year of drought, state leaders fight to save the Great Salt Lake.

Where do things stand today?

What policies are on the table?

What new innovations are being utilized?

And how can Utahns be part of the solution?

- Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund, and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of The Hinkley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week we have Josh Romney, president and CEO of the Romney Group, and leader of the Great Salt Lake Rising Business Coalition.

Natalie Gochnour, director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah.

And Brian Steed, Great Salt Lake Commissioner for the State of Utah.

This is such an important topic.

Thank you for being with us on the show, particularly given your particular roles.

People talk about the Great Salt Lake and they wonder who are the people who are really moving this issue, the ones that are helping setting the policy, the ones that are helping find the funding.

And it's three of you.

And this is gonna be one of those special episodes where we talk about the Great Salt Lake.

What can we do, what's happening right now?

Josh, let's start with you for just a moment because you've been very visible, particularly lately for a very long time, but mobilizing people over the past little while.

Why are you getting so involved right now?

- You know, I think this is the biggest issue facing our state.

You look at the potential damage, and I'll let Brian, he's the expert, knows more about this than anybody on the planet, and Natalie's been working on it for a long time.

But I just saw a role for the business community and philanthropic community to get much more active.

I think there's been so many groups that are actively trying to pursue kind of their little channel.

And what I'm trying to do is bring all those groups together.

We're all essentially fighting for the same thing.

We need more water to the lake, to get those groups together and really just create one unified source for people to be able to donate and really create more awareness about what's happening.

- Natalie, you've been very connected to the policy side of this for quite some time.

You had a strike force that worked on this.

You've done a lot of publications.

Give us a lens right now why this is such a high priority for our state.

- Sure, well, there's a direct connection between the lake's health and our wellbeing, our economic wellbeing, the health of Utahns, and the ecological health of our state.

And the way I like to think of it, Brian, is that Lake stewardship is Utah stewardship.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

And so this is our moment to take the defining geographic characteristic of our state and reset it on a path that leads to greater wellbeing for Utahns.

- Now Brian, this is such an important role that you have as the Great Salt Lake Commissioner.

This is really your primary responsibility and we do know you know more about the lake than anyone.

Will you please set the stage for us a little bit, why we need to be thinking about as sort of the impacts and why this is your sole focus?

- So I think it's a great question and I think that honestly we as Utahns that have grown up around the lake, have kind of taken it for granted.

We think that it's gonna be here forever, and that our uses or our impacts aren't gonna impact the lake.

In truth, we now know differently.

And when we talk about what the Great Salt Lake does for us, it provides all sorts of benefits that oftentimes are kind of hidden to Utahns.

One, it helps provide more snow pack, and we have the greatest snow on earth.

Can you imagine having five to 10% less of that snow per year, what that might mean to our ski industry, as well as what that might mean to just our drinking water?

- [Jason] Why is that?

- Well, because it's lake affects snow that comes off of the lake.

And so you have that warm body of water, and when we have storms come across it that takes that evaporative water off, dumps it on our mountains, and that helps us both with the ski industry, but also maybe more importantly for our drinking water.

Secondly, it provides just a really cool stop over point for 10 to 12 million migratory birds.

And if you go out on the Great Salt Lake, I promise you you'll have a bit of a religious experience looking at just the amount of biodiversity and just the awesomeness that's out there.

And thirdly, this is actually where it strikes close to home.

If we don't take care of it, we know that the lake bed weathers, and as it weathers over time, we actually have dust storms come across there and it'll take up some dust particles.

We've made great progress on making better impacts on air quality.

So we see these trends on like particulate matter at 2.5 and 10 microns, and we've been on the downward slide.

The Great Salt Lake has the potential to really start bringing us back up to where we're in non-attainment.

And that scares all of us because honestly, dust is not healthy for you.

And we would like very much to to control that.

- Okay, I wanna get to that issue for just a moment, particularly when it comes to some of the dust and the impacts on the state of Utah.

And wanna show a small clip, Brian, that you're connected to.

DEQ has put this out, but I wanna put this, this puts us into a perspective of what the impact is going to be on the state of Utah and why everyone, not just those along the Wasatch Front should be paying attention.

Give a comment to this after we watch this video.

- [Brian] Absolutely.

- [Narrator] Over the course of the last 30 plus years, the shrinking Great Salt Lake shoreline has turned bays into barren expanses.

Perry says the reason- - It's not being caused by drought, it's not being caused by climate change, it's being used by overuse of water.

We use 30% more water than what is sustainable for the lake.

- [Narrator] That overuse, he explains, has left 800 square miles of exposed lake bed littered with what he is now out here studying.

- We're standing in a dust hotspot.

And you'll notice that this area right here is lighter in color.

And you'll see how incredibly elusive and how easy it is to generate dust.

- [Narrator] Perry has painstakingly mapped out nearly 700 dust hotspots.

With soil tests revealing cancer-causing carcinogens like arsenic in high concentrations, using immobile wind machines, Perry can measure the force it takes to kick dust into the air and toward our homes.

- And what we really need to answer the question is how much of that dust is making it to the surrounding communities.

- [Narrator] The state of Utah is working to figure that out.

The division of air quality plans to build new sites like this one in key areas with dust monitoring machines.

- We'll have instruments like this or- - [Narrator] DAQ manager Bo Call explains.

- For the dust monitoring, we're looking at a couple of things and one is, where is the air coming from?

- [Narrator] They'll measure the amount of dust blowing around, a lab will then test what's actually in it.

- And whether there is a concern or what the level of concern would be.

- [Narrator] Call says the monitors will also be able to provide real time updates during dust storms.

- That's really about can people do something?

Can they step inside, can they avoid it?

- Yeah, we appreciate PBS for producing this as well.

So please give us some context there, a little bit of your expert view.

- Yeah, certainly.

So as Dr.

Perry mentions there, we are seeing more dust events come off the Great Salt Lake.

One of the things we realized as a state is that we were under monitored.

We don't know how much dust is coming off when, and essentially what's in that dust.

And so one of the things we did is worked together, so the commission's office worked together with the Department of Environmental Quality and came up with a plan.

We provided some funding for the Department of Environmental Quality, and they're now installing 19 monitors around the lake in order to provide that real data that we're going to need to analyze, one, where the dust is coming from, and two, what's in it, and then three, that'll lead us to a better understanding of what we need to do about it.

- Jason, sometimes what's not understood by the public is how much work is being done.

And I think this is a really good example of that.

We have in this state a Great Salt Lake strike team.

This is our research universities, our public research universities, Utah State University and the University of Utah, as well as the state agencies coming together and creating the gold standard of information.

Dr.

Perry, who was in that video, is on that strike team.

We have a lot of other hydrologists and climate scientists, and you name it.

- [Brian] Yeah.

- Engineers who are helping us think through these issues.

I have never seen the legislature turn on a dime like they have for this issue.

- Josh, can we talk about a couple things that include the legislature, but you in particular, I wanna talk about the Great Salt Lake Charter, something that we have just seen over the last week.

Let's talk about what's in that, all three of you, I think, Natalie, you helped write this.

If I understand correctly, you all have signed it.

And with the business community in particular, what's in this charter and how are you able to get so many people together on it?

- I think people are, they want to be engaged on the lake, they just don't know where to go.

And so I think the greatest thing about the charter is it gives people a place to go, to lend their name, to lend their support, and to really get involved and learn more about it.

So Natalie did a phenomenal job writing that.

But I think as we look even bigger, the interesting thing is a big piece of the water is being taken out of Idaho and Wyoming.

So while we still need to focus on Utah, I think we actually need to look outside the state and even look to the federal government and really look at how we're gonna really solve this not just as Utahns, but as a country.

This is a really, really big issue.

And so I think as we can expand from what Natalie's done with the charter and kinda look outside the state as well, I think that'll be really important.

- Yeah, we give us the court print.

Oh, go ahead.

- Well, I was just gonna be, let's be really clear, this charter came from Governor Cox and it came from our speaker of the house and our senate president, and from the business community, the commissioner all coming together.

The core principle of the charter is that we are all in this together.

It's not state government alone, it's not the business community alone, it's not agriculture alone, it's not Lakeside Industries alone.

This lake is so important and the solutions are so complex that we have to all join arms together and that's the spirit of the charter.

- So what were the core principles of it?

- Well, one of- - And how did you get to them?

- Yeah, one of them is that we face trade-offs, that it doesn't just, you can't just, not every decision is in isolation.

You have to make decisions with an understanding of what it creates over here.

Another one is that we're all in it together.

What's your favorite part of it?

- So guess those, please go ahead, please.

So I would say the need for further action I think is really key as well.

And to understand that we really have a short timeframe to really start making those changes that we need to see in order to stabilize the lake.

I think those are really key points.

And oftentimes when we talk about the Great Salt Lake, it becomes someone else's problem.

In truth, the Great Salt Lake is a problem for all of us and all of us have, I mean, I guess the good news is all of us have some ability to help solve it as well by our own individual choices.

- Brian, one of the things you're offering up is not just, so we have the three of you who are policy leaders in the state, but other people can get involved.

- [Brian] Absolutely - Talk about how we can do that.

We might be able to show you a QR code here if people wanna get involved.

- Absolutely.

So the governor's office is hosting the charter.

We'd welcome everyone to take a look.

We will put up the website and make sure that people can a, read the full charter as well as gives an opportunity for the public to sign as well.

Honestly, this is something that we are not going to solve with the actions of state government alone.

We're going to need all of us working together.

And that realization I think is really important for people.

- Jason, I'd love to just also emphasize, I mean, I think we're getting the health issue.

That was a really compelling video on dust.

The ecological issue of these 10 to 12 million birds, I've worked in public policy for a long time.

I very rarely work on hemispheric issues.

- [Jason] Yeah.

- I work on regional economy issues, I work on state issues, sometimes national issues, but we're talking about hemispheric.

Give the audience a feel for the span that these birds fly from.

- So it's really, the Great Salt Lake has become a really critical part of the Pacific Flyway and that means birds traveling all the way from the Arctic to the almost Antarctic are utilizing Great Salt Lake as a stopover point.

- [Natalie] And it's here, it's ours.

- And one thing that's cool, we have this large population of a bird called Wilson's Phalarope, that nest north of here, they stop over and they feed, brine flies and brine shrimp, and then they take flight, and they fly nonstop to Argentina.

That's a long flight.

If you're in an airplane, if you're flapping your wings, it's longer still.

But we're a critical part of that now.

And we have to understand that our actions are going to have this impact not just regionally, but also hemispherically.

- And if you, I mean, think about the health, you think about ecological, and then if you think about the business and economic impact, it's almost unimaginable how big an impact it would have, if even just a small portion of the businesses that are thinking about locating here or are currently locating here decide, "Hey, for the health of our citizens, "we're gonna move elsewhere," if even just a small percent start looking elsewhere, the damage that that would do to our economies is hard to overstate.

And even just families deciding to move, families with young children, that they're worried about the impact of the dust, deciding to move or not come here at all, that would just have a really devastating impact.

- Now give us a little more preview into that because we got people, certainly, it is on people's minds as Josh just said, people are moving, people have health issues here, but what other kind of economic impacts?

- Yeah, well, I mean, Josh hit the key point because it's a reputational risk to our state.

It's part of our brand if we don't take care of this asset.

In economics, I mean, we estimate about 1.9 billion in output annually from this lake, about 7,700 jobs.

It comes from about three areas.

It's the industrial activity on the lake.

So this is the mineral extraction, it's the aquaculture, which is the brine shrimp harvesting and production.

And then it's recreation, not only on the land around the lake, on the water around the lake, but our ski industry.

And those three things are what really contribute to this $1.9 billion output.

But that's just what economists measure.

I wanna be clear, it's what Josh said.

We're not really measuring that reputational risk.

The idea that we host the Olympics in 2034 and the host broadcaster is blasting internationally, that we haven't fulfilled our stewardship at the lake.

That's what I worry about.

- I wanna get to those points with Brian, maybe Josh, a comment about that because as part of the charter specifically tied to some desires to have some things in place before the Olympic Games.

Talk about that, 'cause the world is watching, - The world's gonna be watching.

I know when my dad ran the Olympics in 2002 when he was helping organize that, his biggest fear was that we wouldn't have adequate snow during the Olympics.

And I mean, he's like, "There's nothing we can do to control it.

"We're just gonna have to pray."

I know he prayed a lot, but the reality is, without that lake, the likelihood of having healthy snow by the Olympics is much, much smaller.

And then I just think the reputational risk, like Natalie said, when people come here and they see that we haven't taken care of our namesake, I mean this is the Great Salt Lake.

If we haven't taken care of that, that'll just be really devastating for us.

- Brian, give us a sense of, because I want to transition to what's causing it and then some solutions.

Okay, will you give us some idea about the primary drivers?

- Sure, I think that the easiest way to put this is we are using more water than is sustainable for the lake.

And because of that, I think that we all have some skin in the game in trying to project what we want to be in the future.

And going back to the Olympics, I mean, who doesn't love the Olympics?

But when we look at the last two Olympics.

I mean, you see for Paris Olympics for instance, you see the story of the sun and the environmental problems on the sun.

If you go to Beijing, it's air quality that there's this driver of air quality being a problem.

We have an ability as Utahns to save this and to do it in a way that really does change that trajectory.

So I would say this, people's use of water is, we have always had kind of a surplus of water in the state.

We've had the surplus mentality.

We were gonna have to be a little more cautious on how we use that water.

And that's especially true in our lawns and gardens and how we use water outdoors.

We have to work with the agriculture community as well to make sure that we're using that water in the most efficient way, but in ways that we then can take those savings and dedicate and deliver those to the lake.

- A way I think to put a point on that to what Brian's saying is we had a hundred percent snow pack last year, so we had a good snow year and the lake dropped three feet this year.

So even if we have full snow and everything we're expecting, the lake is gonna continue to drop.

- Yeah, I have a perspective here as well, and this is kind of going back in time, but we had a surgeon general, Everett Koop, you might remember.

- Oh yeah.

- He was under the Reagan administration.

But he's widely credited with taking on smoking cessation and we live in a different world now in smoking.

And when asked how we made that transition, Dr.

Koop said, it wasn't one thing, it was millions of things.

Each of us brought a stone to one side of the scale.

And that's how I think about this issue.

It's everybody's responsibility to figure out how to be more water-wise- - Yeah.

- In this location.

- Bryan, talk about that because it is very easy to think that other parts of the state, this is not as big of a deal for them.

Maybe it's something we should worry about here, but not there.

- So, I think that we're in a water crisis statewide, right?

Not all of that water crisis is gonna impact the Great Salt Lake.

But let's be clear, we have become accustomed to using more water than we have.

We're gonna have to change that trajectory otherwise, I predict we have hardship.

And one of the things we see here on Great Salt Lake is you see a drying lake, and that drying lake that has its own consequences for all of us, whether that be for less habitat for those birds that we talked about, or maybe more problematically, dust storms coming off the lake, and affecting us and the air we breathe.

- Okay, Natalie, you are a policy expert without question.

- [Natalie] Okay.

- My observation for a very long time.

Some of the policies you are seeing brought to the surface that will be helpful with this issue.

- Well, I mentioned earlier that I've never seen the legislature turn on a dime like I have for this issue.

The progress that's been made has been extraordinary.

I mean, the state spent $260 million putting in secondary water metering in some of our counties that will help with water conservation.

They formed the commissioner's office, and we have a Great Salt Lake commissioner, they changed water law and made it so if you don't use it, there's still a beneficial use of it going to the lake.

And then something that we all know is gonna be really important is we've got to buy water leases to help get more water to the lake.

And I think that's critical.

- And they facilitated that in a variety of ways, right?

Both by incentivizing more conservation in the municipal settings as well as incentivizing conservation through ag optimization in ag settings.

And I think that's a really big deal because when you look at the amount of investment we put into that, the state is taking really important steps.

Now, it's not enough, we know that we need to do more.

And that's why I'm so really thrilled to have partners like Josh and his group and others that we're able to work together to see how are we all gonna work to bring the capital that we need to get the water that we need to the lake.

- And I think what's exciting about this is I think there's a lot of technological advancements that we can use to have us farm a little better.

I don't think we're gonna have to see our lives change fundamentally in the state.

Like we're not gonna have to behave completely different.

Our yards aren't gonna look completely different, but we do need to make adjustments.

We need to find better ways to do it.

Better grass seeds, they've developed this new hybrid, Bermuda grass seed that's really uses what, 90% less water.

I mean, it's really fantastic.

So there's a whole bunch of advancements that are being made, but we need to implement them and we kind of, we need to do it quickly.

Like we don't have a couple years to figure this out.

If we want to have this lake healthy by the Olympics, we've gotta be acting right now.

And so part of what we see urgency is working with the legislature, helping them understand what the true needs are because we, like Natalie says, they do care, they really want to help, but sometimes we don't know exactly what to do.

And we've been experimenting with things over the last few years.

Turns out some of the things we've been doing haven't worked real well.

I mean, right now to transfer a water share to the Great Salt Lake takes hundreds of legal hours.

It's like, well, we gotta fix that before we start buying a lot of water shares or doing that or leasing those.

So there's a lot of things that we need the legislature to do before we can fully implement a plan.

And that's part of where Brian and Natalie are being so helpful is saying, "Hey, here's some things that we need to do first, "we need to kinda get the foundation right "before we start building this house."

But the reality is the water is here, that's what's exciting.

We don't have to import it, we don't have to do anything crazy.

We have enough water, it's here, it's in the valley, and if we use it appropriately, we can begin to fill this lake up.

- And if I could follow on to that, I mean, interestingly, even if you, we all live in areas where we've been accustomed to having these swaths of yard around us with grass, most people water their lawns too much.

There's been study after study that's shown this.

And if people just water their lawns what it takes, like what it actually needs versus what you think it needs, you're looking at a 20 to 30% reduction in water use.

When you extrapolate that over the full range of the Great Salt Lake basin, that's over a hundred thousand acre feet of water saved.

That's a hundred thousand American football fields of foot deep in water.

It takes us long ways towards getting, towards sustainability on the lake.

And it's just by a really simple act of just watering less.

- Jason, and I'll just add.

One of the contributions of the strike team- - Yeah.

- Is to help us to know that this is possible.

Like we gotta do it now, but we've run over a thousand scenarios with different temperature, different whatnot.

The state water lab at Utah State University under the guidance of David Tarboton and Beth Neilsen, have run these scenarios and have helped us to understand that we can do this.

Utahns should not be negative about this.

They should look forward with positivity that our legislature's acting, our commissioner's acting, the business community's acting.

We can do this.

- I like to think about, sorry to cut you off.

- Please.

- But I like to think about, when our pioneers came into this valley and it's like, here's an impossible task.

No one can do this.

No one wants to live here, but they were able to make the desert bloom.

And now I think Utahns have the same challenge.

I mean, I think it is as big a challenge as they faced back then where we really do need to come together.

And I think of anywhere in the world that this could happen, it's gonna be Utah because we have the legislative support, we have the governor's support, we have the business community, leaders like Natalie and Brian who are willing to do this.

But I do think it's important to state, there is no saline lake in the globe that has gone through the decline that has actually been recovered.

So this is not an easy thing, but if it's gonna happen anywhere, it's gonna happen here.

- Talk about some of your efforts recently too.

You've helped get a pledge for $200 million from the business community.

Talk about that, the partners.

(Jason laughing) - It was a hundred, but it was good.

And then actually I think- - [Jason] From another group.

- I can speak to the other.

- You're the first hundred, Bryan will be the second.

Is that right, okay, good.

- I think I was Stuart Adams that said Josh Romney's writing a hundred million dollars check.

Something like that.

I was like, "Hey, why not?

"I'll write it, I'll write it, "it won't cash, but I'll write it."

But what I've seen is that Utah is unique in that we have these incredible philanthropic families who just care so much about the state and invest so much here.

I mean, you can see we all know who they are and obviously some are underwriting your show, but we have such a unique group of people that want to give so much.

And so I think as I've been talking to them, there's a huge interest, and people just haven't known where to put it and where to allocate it.

And I think one of the keys that we have and this board that I'm creating, one of the keys is Brian is on this board.

We are gonna work hand in hand with the state government and hopefully the federal government at some point, but we want to do science-backed, data-driven implementation.

So we don't want to go out and kind of just what, what feels good and what sounds good.

And we want to actually really follow what Brian and Natalie are gonna come up with to say, "Hey, here's the data, here's what really works."

If we'd written a check to buy water rights a couple years ago, it wouldn't have gone so well.

So it needs to be done in process and we have incredible team of people putting that together for us.

- And so in addition to what Josh is talking about in Great Salt Lake Rising's efforts, Ducks Unlimited also came in as a national organization and pledged an additional a hundred million dollars and that's gonna be over the next 10 years.

So by the $10 million commitment per year, Ducks Unlimited interest is very much tied to the important wetlands around the lake.

And when you think about all of those migratory birds that come through, a lot of those are ducks.

And it's something that very much they're concerned about.

So I think working together is pretty cool.

- Yeah, I love it.

But I think it's also important to understand, this is probably more like a $5 billion problem.

Not a $200 million problem.

So the 200 million kind of is your first baby step.

But this is, and I don't know the exact numbers, and Brian, you're closer.

And I've heard ranges from like 3 to 7 billion to 10 billion.

This is at least a 5 billion problem in my mind.

So we're just starting, but we gotta start now.

We gotta start going as fast as we can with the resources we have.

- Natalie, in our last 30 seconds here, since you're so great at framing, give us a vision of where we're going forward, the next steps.

We're all listening, we care, the next steps.

- Hemispheric issue, a direct connection to our wellbeing, to our health, to our economy, to our ecology.

The world's watching, the future's watching, don't (indistinct).

- Perfect, last words there.

Thank you so much for all you're doing on behalf of all of us, and thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast.

Thank you for being with us and we'll see you next week.

Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund, and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you, thank you.

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