Most readers will be familiar with the adage, "Use it or lose it," when it comes to departmental budgets. Departments who conserve when spending their annual budgets find those budgets cut the next year by the amount they didn't use with the rationale being that if they didn't use it, they must not need it. This may not be right, but it is reality.
Such is the case with Utah water. Zach Frankel and other environmentalists want us to conserve rather than develop our water resources ("Groups slam state water chief, make call for audit" June 27), but reality says we should be doing the opposite. We should strenuously develop every water resource available to us now, especially in the Colorado River basin, because politically stronger states are already overdeveloping their shares and will eventually claim everything available, even our share, using the excuse that since we have not developed it we must not need it. However, by developing this resource ourselves, we trump their claims of "needing it more." Only after we have developed it should we use conservation to stretch that resource.
I am not really a fan of the Lake Powell Pipeline, but the project at least allows Utah to claim priority on the water we are already entitled to, rather than losing in a political battle with more powerful states.
Brian Myers
Bountiful