As Kennecott and the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District work toward a plan to clean up contaminated groundwater in the southwest Salt Lake Valley, some residents are worried they are footing the bill to fix a mess Kennecott made.
South Jordan resident Tom Belchak told members of a legislative interim subcommittee Tuesday that he and a group of residents had submitted but as yet had received no answers to a series of 39 questions.
The "one burning question," Belchak said, was how much the water district would pay and specifically what elements of the proposed project the district would pay for.
After the meeting, Belchak, a state-licensed hydrogeologist, summed up his group's cost-related concerns with one question: Why is the public cleaning up private polluters' messes?
At issue is cleaning up a 72-square-mile plume of underground water contaminated by sulfates from Kennecott Utah Copper's operations. The water, which flows from the Oquirrh Mountains toward the Jordan River, lies beneath West Jordan, South Jordan, Riverton, Herriman and nearby areas of the southwest valley.
Paula Doughty, director of environmental affairs for Kennecott, said the cost issue comes down to simple misunderstanding of the payment structure.
"Kennecott is paying for all the treatment associated with the contamination," she said.
The state is studying the current version of the plan, which would use reverse osmosis to filter selenium, salts and heavy metals from the groundwater and pipe the pollutants elsewhere.
Doughty said the water district, a quasi-governmental agency funded by water rates, is only paying for pipelines and wells that it would have to build to make use of the groundwater.
"Costs that would have been incurred by the district to develop their water resources — wells, pipes and things like that — there is a part of that that they will continue to incur because that has nothing to do with contamination," Doughty said.
Under the current plan, some of the contaminants would be piped to Kennecott's tailings pond near the Great Salt Lake. The crux of the state's study now is to see whether it would be environmentally acceptable to pipe some of the contaminants into the lake itself.
But as committees and meetings are set up to study the impact on brine shrimp and waterfowl, southwest Salt Lake County residents have concerns about the plan's impacts on themselves.
Private well owners worry that Kennecott will get overzealous and suck up too much water in its cleaning process, hindering their access to well water. Belchak's group will await answers to questions he said they have been asking for a year to no avail.
Department of Environmental Quality Executive Director Dianne Nielson said the residents will see answers to their questions as part of her report when she accepts or rejects the current proposal. She said that is standard procedure. The public's concerns are gathered during a comment period, taken into account and answered with the final proposal, she said.
Proposal details are available at www.deq.utah.gov/issues/nrd/.
E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com