State rolls out draft update to Great Salt Lake management plan and an interactive 'Explorer' tool

Ben Styman, deputy director of the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, updated the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council on a broad rewrite of the statewide Comprehensive Management Plan for sovereign lands and unveiled an interactive web tool meant to make plan rules and conditions easier to use.

Styman said the CMP, last updated in 2013, is being restructured to be more concise, living and web-driven so it can be updated as managers learn new science. "We manage sovereign lands which are the lands lying below the ordinary high water mark of navigable bodies of water at the date of statehood," Styman said, explaining the division's statutory role.

Why it matters: the CMP defines allowable uses on the lakebed, ties management actions to lake-level conditions and coordinates multiple state agency plans. The division is also clarifying management classes (numbered 1–6) that range from least to most protective, and linking them to an updated elevation/salinity matrix intended to guide when different interventions or permits are appropriate.

Styman described the new Great Salt Lake Explorer as an interactive platform that lets users click locations, view the classification for a parcel, see whether particular uses (grazing, marinas, pipelines, evaporation ponds, boat harbors) are allowable or potentially allowable, and review citations and data behind the guidance. He said the Explorer will include layers for boundaries such as WMAs, municipal borders and flood zones and will be kept current as new monitoring and research is added.

Styman cautioned that the CMP does not govern upstream water distribution or reservoir operations. He noted a statutory change in 2022 that gave the state the authority to hold water rights for the benefit of the Great Salt Lake, and he said the CMP will reference that authority and the state's water portfolio acquired through voluntary agreements.

Styman identified areas that will receive targeted attention, including remediation work near the former US Magnesium leases and refined WMA and refuge boundaries such as at Bear River Bay. He invited public input through an on-line survey and QR codes distributed at the meeting and said the division's goal is to publish a formal draft by late summer (Jacobs, the contractor, has indicated a possible October timeline).

During audience Q&A, council members asked whether floating solar would be permitted in class-three areas. Styman said the public-trust requirement to preserve navigation makes floating solar difficult in many places and that the team had avoided prescriptive lists of uses that were plainly inappropriate in order to allow site-specific assessments. He also reiterated the division's intent to preserve the elevation matrix as a tool while clarifying how it is used internally—not as a public "scorecard" but as a guide to vulnerabilities and interventions.

The division will append responses to public comments in the draft. The council encouraged continued outreach and coordination with partner agencies and stakeholders.

The council accepted the presentation and moved on to subsequent agenda items.