A landslide and canal collapse that caused three deaths in Logan was "a wake-up call" that demands a response, Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert said as he instructed a state task force to investigate the "urgent problem" of canal safety in Utah.
Herbert, likely to become Utah's 17th governor next week, has called on the board to make recommendations for protecting the increasing number of Utahns who live in proximity of the state's largely unregulated 6,600-mile canal system.
The state Executive Water Task Force will study the issue in the coming months. But the conversation that ensued in response to Herbert's charge at a Tuesday afternoon meeting might give some insight into what is to come.
The group -- led by a former canal company president and stacked with farmers, canal owners and attorneys who represent water-rights holders -- appeared united in opposition to any solution that would place the financial burden for upgrading canals entirely on the shareholders that own the private, nonprofit companies that run most of Utah's irrigation channels. Several members noted that the canals were far less dangerous to the public before Utah's explosive residential development made the waterways part of the landscape in many urban areas.
"It's not their doing that houses have been built above, below and so on and that they are now hemmed in," said task force member Warren Peterson, vice president of Farmland Reserve Inc., an agricultural property holding company for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We've got to find a way to protect these canal companies from liability."
Sterling Brown, vice president of public policy for the Utah Farm Bureau, an organization dedicated to increasing revenue for the state's farmers, said that an initial meeting of a subcommittee of the task force came up with "a small laundry list of options" for addressing canal safety. Among the ideas the subcommittee discussed and will continue to pursue, he said, is special taxing districts comprising everyone who lives near a canal corridor, regardless of whether they draw water from the canal.
He also said the group would review the possibility of establishing "protection areas" in which developers must meet more-stringent engineering rules before building on property near a canal.
Utah Department of Natural Resources director Mike Styler, who led the task force and is the former president of the Deseret Irrigation Company in Delta, said that he expects that the group "will give a fair evaluation of what needs to be done," irrespective of the personal interests of its members.
"We're pretty brutally honest with each other," Styler said in a post-meeting interview. "There have never been punches pulled in telling one another that we have to do things right."
State Reps. Ben Ferry and Patrick Painter, two likely champions of task-force legislation, warned that the state might not have money to fund canal oversight. They agreed that it would be easy if canal company owners and local governments took it upon themselves to regulate.
"Canal owners and companies would likely respond better to a bottom-up approach," Painter said, getting a host of affirmative nods in response.
