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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

THIS IS A GRIFT.

Joel Ferry, the executive director of Utah's DNR retooled state laws to allow water right leasing and promoted HB187 which allows you to hold water rights without developing them.

He also happens to be a large shareholder in Bear River Canal Company and has been going around quietly buying up water rights from smaller canals and municipalities.

Grow The Flow is closely aligned with Great Salt Lake Rising (ran by the son of Mitt Romney), who plan to solve the issue ahead of the 2034 Olympics by buying up water rights from private owners. They committed $100 million of their own money, but got it matched with $300 million in state funds and a $1 billion budget line item from the Trump administration.

Be wary of environmentalism that is being driven by the wealthiest families in the state.

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Not really sure what the grift is here. Great Salt Lake Rising seems pretty reasonable reading their website https://gslrising.org/

To quote: “We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.

- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually

- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year

- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet

- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization

- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation

- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake

- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”

Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.

Can you spell out how the grift works? All I'm understanding from your post is that wealthy people are connected to the effort.

Put simply government officials created a scheme to buy up a bunch of unused water rights, then use state and federal dollars to pay themselves incentives to continue not using the water.

I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about, but I've heard it said more than once that a lot of Utah politicians have conflicts of interest with respect to allowing more water to flow into the lake (ties to agriculture, etc). The situation has probably changed somewhat now that parts of the city have shelter in place orders because of toxic clouds, but people have been talking about it for decades now.

If the politicians said they wanted to buy up water rights and not use them. and actually bought them up so they can used by their cronies, that would certainly be grift, but OP seems to be against "hold[ing] water rights without developing them", which is exactly what you have to do if you want more water to flow into the lake...

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