It seems ludicrous to exclude water officials from a gathering of two dozen influential politicians and Utah tourism and ski industry officials set to discuss mountain transportation proposals, including a two-mile tunnel connecting Alta and Brighton and a four-mile tunnel between Brighton and Park City.

And yet, neither Salt Lake City public utilities director LeRoy Hooton Jr. nor anyone else from his department was invited to the meeting to be hosted Friday by Gov. Jon Huntsman. Water officials in Sandy, which owns the rights to more than a third of the water coming out of Little Cottonwood Canyon, are as rightly concerned as Hooten, and as deeply in the dark.

Scant available details of the $300 million to $550 million proposal indicate the tunnels would link ski resorts in Park City with those in Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood canyons and keep the seasonal Guardsman Pass open all year.

Connecting ski resorts via tunnels may be a fine idea and perhaps it's possible to blast through the mountains without disturbing the hydrology of the streams that are the lifeblood for residents of the east bench. But it seems only logical to find out before any kind of serious talks about such projects.

Cullen Battle, chairman of the city utilities public advisory committee, makes the sensible point that Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County, as well as the U.S. Forest Service, all have master plans for the central Wasatch Mountains. Those plans were approved only after consideration of extensive public comment.

Those well-vetted plans and the opinions of people whose job it is to implement them should all be considered before a group of influential people, whose primary interests are economic and business development, not watershed protection, even begins to promote the idea of tunneling though the mountains