League webinar launches Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan; officials seek municipal priorities

Justin Lee, deputy director of the Utah League of Cities and Towns, opened a webinar that introduced the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan and urged municipal participation in the multi-year effort. Jason Brown of Envision Utah and Laura Vernon of the Division of Water Resources led the presentation and an interactive listening session for local officials.

The plan is a basin-scale roadmap intended to guide water management across roughly 36,000 square miles and multiple jurisdictions. "We're looking at a basin-wide plan," Vernon said, noting the complexity: the basin includes "150,000 water right holders" and "2.6 million humans living in and around Great Salt Lake," and the plan must weigh ecological, agricultural and municipal demands. Vernon said the project will pair a hydrodynamic model developed with the Bureau of Reclamation with stakeholder-developed scenarios to measure tradeoffs such as lake level, salinity and dust suppression.

Vernon described the governance structure for the effort: oversight by the Great Salt Lake Commissioner's office with operational leadership by the Division of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation, plus a steering committee of basin stakeholders and an advisory group of state and federal partners. She said the team is wrapping up an initial listening phase and will use model scenarios in phase two to test strategies; she stated a target to wrap the planning process by the end of 2027 and begin implementation in 2028.

Presenters summarized topics heard so far—ecosystem health, air quality and public health concerns, salinity, and impacts related to major events such as the Olympics—and offered example strategies that respondents and stakeholders have proposed, including residential water-conservation targets, agricultural optimization, targeted water leasing, wetland management timing and turf removal. "These are just some of the strategies that we've heard so far," Vernon said, and presenters called many items "straw men" to be tested in modeling rather than preselected solutions.

The webinar included a live interactive session run through a Converge platform (utah.startconverge.com, conference ID 2060) to collect participants' priorities. Early poll results and facilitator summaries showed top priorities clustered around balancing water rights and lake needs, addressing climate and hydrologic impacts, and mitigating air-quality risks. On preferred strategies, attendees ranked reducing and optimizing agricultural water use, municipal and industrial conservation (including lawn reduction), and improved coordinated leadership and planning among top choices.

Facilitators asked attendees to identify measures they would use to judge success, foreseeable tradeoffs (for example, large-scale turf removal could increase urban heat effects or tree loss), and barriers to implementation—citing the need for research, funding channels, and partnership frameworks. Presenters flagged the Utah agricultural optimization report as a resource for assessing ag strategies and emphasized that the basin plan will require participation across cities, agriculture, industry and state and federal agencies.

Organizers directed attendees to the Basin Integrated Plan website (water.utah.gov) for updates, said slides and materials would be shared, and invited teams to request local briefings. The listening session is one of multiple engagement steps; presenters encouraged officials to complete the interactive survey and to suggest other groups that should be consulted as the modeling and scenario work proceeds.

Next steps: officials will incorporate the collected priorities into scenario development and model runs, then return to stakeholders with modeled tradeoffs and potential strategies before finalizing recommendations.