FAIRVIEW, Sanpete County — Getting a dam and reservoir approved and built can take a long time.
But an effort to build what is now known as the Narrows Project, a water storage facility serving northern Sanpete County, has been bogged in federal bureaucracy for 70 years, Sanpete leaders said Wednesday at a press conference at the proposed dam site.
Sanpete County Commissioner Claudia Jarrett contended that a dispute with Carbon County over whether Carbon or Sanpete County has legal rights to water that would be stored in the reservoir was resolved in Sanpete's favor more than a decade ago.
"There has been a right denied, and therefore justice has been denied," she said. "Sanpete County has been denied its right to 5,400 acre feet of water for too many years."
The effort to build the dam and reservoir goes back to the 1930s when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed a comprehensive water storage system called the Gooseberry Project.
The project, designed to serve both Sanpete and Carbon, included expanding Scofield Reservoir in Carbon County, building a transmountain tunnel to bring water from Carbon County west into Sanpete and building a dam and reservoir in northwestern Sanpete to store the water.
From the beginning, the glitch has been that Gooseberry Creek, the source for the proposed reservoir, is on the eastern slope of the Wasatch Plateau. Although the stream is inside Sanpete County's border, it naturally runs east into Carbon, emptying into a stream that flows into Scofield.
Nonetheless, according to a chronology released at the press conference, in 1943 the federal government and two Carbon County water agencies signed what is known as the Tripartite Agreement acknowledging Sanpete County's right to the Gooseberry water. Then in 1946, the Scofield Dam started to fail. The federal government was worried that if the dam broke, a railroad critical to the World War II effort would be flooded. So it rebuilt the dam and completed the first part of the Gooseberry Project — enlarging Scofield Reservoir. Once the Gooseberry Project was segmented into two pieces, "Carbon County was happy," said Richard Noble, project engineer for the Narrows Project for the past 15 years. "It had this big reservoir all to itself." And because completion of the project would reduce the water flow into Scofield, Carbon began fighting the project, he said.
Nobel contended that because the full Gooseberry Project was never completed, more water is flowing into Scofield than the reservoir can hold. So more than 9,000 acre feet per year are spilled downstream, ultimately flowing into the Colorado River and Gulf of Mexico.
In 1956, Congress enacted the Colorado River Storage Project Act, which included the incomplete features of the Gooseberry Project, the press conference chronology shows. In 1962, the U.S. Forest Service issued a permit to construct the dam. But Carbon County opposition continued.
In 1984, the Sanpete Water Conservancy District and the two principal Carbon water agencies signed another agreement, called the Compromise Agreement. That pact set the amount of water that should be diverted back to Sanpete County at 5,400 acre feet.
Between 1984 and 1995, the project seemed to be on track for construction. The state engineer, U.S. Forest Service and BOR issued various formal approvals. An environmental impact statement was issued. Then Carbon filed suit challenging the EIS.
Rather than get into a court battle, the BOR, the agency responsible for the EIS, decided to issue a new statement. That document was issued in 1998. That, according to the chronology, is where progress stopped.
Now, said Noble, the BOR says the second EIS is out of date. But the agency has done nothing for the past year to update it.
Why? Noble says the project has run into a political stumbling block. When Utah was redistricted in 2001, Carbon County ended up in the district of Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, while Sanpete remained in that of Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah. Matheson wrote a letter to the BOR opposing the project. That, he says, is causing the agency to "backpedal."
Officials at the press conference said the $25 million project would be financed by federal and state loans. The loans would be paid off entirely by Sanpete County residents through water sales and property taxes paid to the Sanpete Water Conservancy District.
The project is critical for both agriculture and for communities along U.S. 89, the officials said. Northern Sanpete County, they said, is one of the few areas of Utah with no water storage to draw on when demand exceeds supply.
Between 1990 and 2000, Sanpete's population grew 40 percent. Greg Soter, public relations representative for the conservancy district, said if the project is built, eventually most of the water will need to be diverted from agriculture to metropolitan use.
E-mail: sdean@manti.com