State hosts town hall on Unified Water Infrastructure Plan prioritization, timelines and funding questions

State water officials outlined a draft prioritization process for the Unified Water Infrastructure Plan and answered public questions at an Oct. town hall, saying the plan will centralize project submissions, rank projects against statutory criteria and produce recommendations to the Legislature on how much to seek for the Water Infrastructure Fund.

The town hall was led by Nathan Lundstad, director of the Division of Drinking Water and a member of the Water Development Coordinating Council (WDCC), and Eric Dixon of the Division of Water Resources, who said the state is piloting the new intake and prioritization process. “This is our guinea pig, public meeting, so if we have some hiccups and stuff here, just work with us,” Dixon said during his presentation.

The draft process combines projects submitted earlier this year into three “relevant agency” plans for drinking water, water quality and water resources, applies a provisional scoring system drawn from House Bill 280 (2024) with clarifications from House Bill 285 (2025), and proposes annual updates to agency plans and quadrennial updates to the Unified plan. The state plans to open the Utah Project Portal for applicants to confirm and update submissions by late October or early November, officials said.

Why it matters: The state’s aim is to coordinate multiple existing funding paths, reduce duplicated requests to the Legislature and create a single prioritized list used to request funding. “Part of the UIP goals is to make this a better process, create a more comprehensive, prioritized list of water projects, and centralize the application process,” Lundstad said.

Key elements of the draft prioritization

- Scope and scale: Officials said initial submissions indicate roughly $18 billion of needed water infrastructure investment…