Make Your Voice Heard
Submit your comments below!
Water officials from Cedar City, Utah want to siphon billions of gallons of water away from rural valleys to maintain unsustainable sprawl. The federal government just released the Final Environmental Impact Statement, which offers the public the last opportunity to offer input on this disastrous project.
The proposed pipeline will hurt communities like Milford, Minersville, Wah Wah Valley, and Baker. Additionally, it could harm places like Great Basin National Park, Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, the Great Salt Lake Desert, and sacred tribal sites.
You can help prevent this disastrous pipeline from being built. The Bureau of Land Management is not providing a meaningful time for comment (2 days) on the last round of input on the proposed pipeline that will siphon billions of gallons of groundwater annually from a network of aquifers known as the Great Salt Lake Desert Inter-basin Flow System. Make your voice heard by commending before the deadline at the end of February.
Read the report that reviews the science and underscores our concerns
Submit Your Comment Here
For additional guidance please see below
Comment Guide
There are three steps to a successful DEIS comment submission.
1. Write your name, address, and relationship to the project
It is important that the BLM understand why your voice matters when reviewing comments. Start your comment by introducing yourself and providing all your contact information, including your address.
2. Personalize your message
Tell the BLM why this project matters to you. Are you concerned about project costs – tax hikes and rate spikes – in Cedar City? Are you concerned about impacts to the Great Salt Lake or Great Basin NP? Are you in an ag family? Are you worried about the water supply in Beaver County, Millard County, Juab County or White Pine County? Are you concerned about wildlife, plant life and human life along the NV-UT border? Simply tell the BLM why you are concerned about the multi-phase project that aims to siphon more than 8.4 billion gallons of groundwater annually from the West Desert – impacting more than 10,000 square miles of the Great Basin.
3. Consider the following points when crafting your comment letter
Tell BLM that Officials Must do One of the Following: 1. Issue a Supplemental EIS 2. Re-start NEPA 3. Choose the No-Action Alternative. These are the only acceptable options.
Failure to Consider the Whole Project: The BLM has not considered the environmental effects not only of the Pine Valley Water Supply Project (“PVWSP”), but of the full planned West Desert Pipeline Project, of which the PVWSP is only the first phase. By failing to consider the full project, the BLM has masked the full extent of predicted impacts, which will be of far greater scale than the impacts from the PVWSP alone.
Failure to Consider the Full Geographic Scope of Impacts: The BLM and applicant have artificially narrowed the geographic scope of the impacts analysis and have failed to disclose impacts which will occur in the full area where water table drawdown is predicted to occur, which area will extend to resources such as Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge and Great Basin National Park.
Insufficient Water Available to Supply the Project: There is insufficient water available to supply the project without causing devastating impacts environmental resources in the predicted drawdown area. This is a classic groundwater mining project, which will have devastating impacts over a broad area of western Utah and eastern Nevada.
Failure to Implement Conservation Measures: The BLM and CICWCD have refused to meaningfully consider robust conservation measures as an alternative to pumping the water of CICWCD’s northern neighbors, despite the fact that conserved water is cheaper than pumped and piped water.
The Project is Cost Prohibitive: The BLM’s predicted cost of the project likely presents only a fraction of the project’s true cost, because the BLM and CICWCD have failed to account for potentially astronomical costs of monitoring and mitigation, which could dwarf construction costs. Project proponents have also not updated cost estimates for inflation in a meaningful way. This artificially low cost projection results in an artificially low estimate of projected water rate increases in the project service area and calls into question CICWCD’s ability to finance the project.
The Project is a Taxpayer and Ratepayer Boondoggle: CICWCD’s own consultants estimated that the project will increase rates by many magnitudes in the coming decades. CICWCD’s annual budget is approximately $4-5 million but its efforts in Pine and Wah Wah will be – at the very least – nearing $500 million in project costs. A consultant report for CICWCD said that if the water provider cannot meet its payments, it will be legally obliged to increase rates on consumers.
Monitoring and Mitigation Will Be Ineffective:
- Monitoring well locations – The BLM has failed to include adequate information to assess the adequacy of monitoring.
- Monitoring regimes must be created which will adequately predict drawdown and impacts with sufficient time for mitigation measures to be effective, taking into consideration both flow paths and lag time associated with management changes in response to detected impacts.
- The proposal includes only a plan for a plan and thus it is impossible for the BLM to assess whether mitigation will be effective at mitigating adverse environmental impacts.
- The proposal includes no analysis of the feasibility or effectiveness of its approach to mitigation, namely replacement water. Specifically, there is no analysis of what quantity of replacement water would be necessary or available, or of the suitability of that replacement water in terms of water quality.