The Great Salt Lake Advisory Council devoted the bulk of its meeting to a facilitated public‑engagement exercise designed to surface values and measurable priorities for a multi‑year Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan. Laura Vernon of Water Resources described the project’s four phases — priorities, alternatives/modeling, trade‑off analysis, and recommendations/action planning — and said partners include Envision Utah, Bureau of Reclamation modelers and engineering teams.

"This plan isn't about save only saving Great Salt Lake," Vernon said as she framed the plan as a basin‑wide roadmap to balance a healthy lake and a high quality of life across the basin. She asked the council to treat the meeting as a test of the engagement tools and to help refine the scenarios the modeling team will run.

Jason Brown, chief executive of Envision Utah, demonstrated the online engagement platform (utah.startconverge.com) and described the session as "instead of thinking of this as a survey, I want to you to think of this as a discussion." Participants logged responses anonymously and used the tool to brainstorm priorities, rate top items and suggest measurable metrics. Early results showed Great Salt Lake ecosystem health and management leading the vote, followed by water conservation, sustainable growth and dust mitigation.

Council discussion identified candidate strategy levers to feed into scenario modeling: phragmites removal, burn management, agricultural optimization, residential conservation and landscaping changes (including reducing nonfunctional turf), water rights dedication/acquisition/leasing, and demand management through pricing and accountability. Participants emphasized the need to package strategies into realistic scenarios and to weight input from different stakeholder groups appropriately when reconciling feedback.

The group also ranked barriers and risks: lack of coordinated basin‑level management, funding shortages, misinformation or public inattention, and competing uses (including aquifer impacts). Top risks named were ecosystem collapse, economic decline, and public health deterioration tied to dust and air quality.

Facilitators committed to categorizing the workshop results, packaging them into scenarios for the modeling team, and returning findings to council members in future meetings. Council members asked project leads to ensure outreach reaches diverse sectors (cities and towns leagues, agricultural and manufacturing interests, and neighboring states where the Bear River flows) so the model’s assumptions reflect broad perspectives rather than a single constituency.