This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Folks at the Utah Division of Water Resources were certainly quick to fess up.

Not a week after they had submitted a 6,000-page application for one of the many permits that would be needed to build the long-dreamed — or long-feared — Lake Powell Pipeline, they admitted that the complex document is littered with errors.

Corrections, we are assured, are on the way.

What nobody in Utah officialdom has yet been willing to admit — or perhaps even grasp — is the fact that the Lake Powell Pipeline is not just full of mistakes. It is a mistake.

And the only real correction the state could make right now is not to amend the application, but to withdraw it.

Not that that's likely to happen.

DWR and just about everyone else officially involved in the process are, and long have been, devoted to the idea that someone should spend somewhere between $1.3 billion and $2.8 million to build a giant straw that would suck a big portion of what water is left in Lake Powell in south-central Utah and move it to the rapidly growing communities in and near Washington County in the parched southwest corner of the state.

The technical purpose of the application the DWR filed last week is to get permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to include a couple of hydroelectric dams as part of the project. Ideally, such features should help pay for the construction and operation of such a giant project.

But there is no reason to believe that whatever revenue might flow from that part of the project would matter.

In fact, there's no reason so far to assume that anything has a reasonable expectation of covering those costs. And, until that fatal flaw in the whole idea is fixed, all the rest is just a huge waste of government time and taxpayers' money.

Calculations from pipeline critics reasonably suggest the project would only add up if current and future water users are charged the proverbial arm and leg in increased water bills and hook-up fees.

Those costs might well be high enough to impose a level of self-directed water conservation on customers of the Washington that nobody in authority seems willing to fully consider. But that's a lousy reason to build the pipeline.

Even after the state fixes the problems in its 6,000-page collection of charts and tables and maps and circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back. Even if it wins FERC approve two years down the road. Even if all the other government agencies involved also give their approval. Nobody has a clue how this humongous sponge will be paid for.

Until that question is answered, all the rest is noise.