2026 Legislative Session Takes a Step Closer to Great Salt Lake Failure

Many have long wanted to believe that Utah will save the Great Salt Lake, and there has been a lot of state-sponsored propaganda recently about reversing Utah’s water failures before the 2034 Olympics. But behind this smokescreen, Utah water agencies have been advancing policies which shrink the Great Salt Lake using dikes and berms. The 2026 Utah Legislative Session is likely to offer Utahns their first glimpse at this post-mortem future emerging from behind the veil of propaganda.

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After failing to regulate upstream diversions, governments around the world have destroyed their saline lakes by diking them down to smaller volumes. Instead of reducing wasteful diversions, Utah water lobbyists wrote legislation to enable unlimited dike construction anywhere on the Great Salt Lake. Water lobbyists also created elaborate propaganda to fool Utahns into believing that policies were being implemented to save the lake, even as legislation was introduced to start shrinking it, like last summer’s North Arm bill.

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Utah leaders also invested tax money into research on Great Salt Lake dikes and water pumps for toxic dust mitigation. The result of this research is a secret study which the Division of Water Resources is sitting on and will be used to justify legislative action to dike the Great Salt Lake inside Farmington Bay. Instead of being unveiled to allow the public to weigh in with ample advance time, this legislation will likely be unveiled at the last possible moment of the legislative session to avoid public opposition. This explains why the completed report is being withheld from the public.  

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What is so infuriating about this top-secret report and the timing of its release is that it is already guiding state policy toward expensive diking and away from Great Salt Lake restoration. This policy puts Utah taxpayers on the path toward the most expensive possible future, and it will drop the Great Salt Lake several feet in elevation by using precious lake water for evaporative purposes. Our report on the Great Salt Lake’s toxic dust, Downwind, concludes that mitigating the dust once the lake has dried could cost as much as $35 billion over 40 years.

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State leaders know Utahns are hoping they will restore the Great Salt Lake, the largest remaining wetland ecosystem in the American West. That’s why they fear transparency and public scrutiny of their plans to dry up the lake. The only question now is if Utah taxpayers will continue to stand for the state’s failure.

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Tell your legislators not to dike Farmington Bay.

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