Utah company to appeal state pulling plug on $6B lake proposal

A Utah company is appealing a state decision to quash an ambitious $6 billion plan — the largest in state history — to create human-made islands on Utah Lake, KSL.com reports.

Claiming there are still environmental challenges that need to be addressed, Lake Restoration Solutions says it will appeal the decision of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands to stop the project.

The plans called for about 60 dredgers to deepen the lake by 7 feet and use the dredged material to construct islands — covering up to one-fifth of the lake’s surface — that would be used for commercial, residential and recreational development.

After its director raised several legal questions about the application, the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands in October announced that it was pulling the plug on the application.

The lake for years has been suffering from low water levels as well as algae blooms, with the number of annual visitors plummeting from 300,000 in 2010 to just over 100,000 in 2017, according to the Deseret News.

The company says the project would resolve those issues as well as boost the state’s tight real-estate market.

But opponents questioned whether the project would fix the lake’s issues or, instead, would create more problems, including pollution and flooding.

“When you’re creating a system with so many weak links, it doesn’t take much to create a big disaster,” Rajagopalan Balaji, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Deseret News.

“It didn’t align with principles of ecological restoration,” Ben Abbott, an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology at Brigham Young University, told the KSL.

Lake Restoration Solutions sued Abbott for defamation for alleged comments related to the project. Abbott told the outlet he believes Lake Restoration is angling to sue the state over the canceled project.

“The state bent over backward to accommodate their project. They provided funding, they made agency time available to help this group develop their proposal,” he said. “Then to see LRS just turn on them and attack them, and accuse them of doing all these bad things — being illegal and masquerading as a judge — [it’s] really disappointing.

Utah Lake isn’t the only proposed large-scale project involving a body of water out West that developers have their eyes on.

In Nebraska, state officials and developers are mulling digging a 4,000-acre lake, likely between Omaha and Lincoln, to boost population retention, recreation and economic development.

— Ted Glanzer