The Great Salt Lake has a new quarterback

The newly appointed Great Salt Lake commissioner, Hannah Freeze, is determined to keep Utah’s largest lake from disappearing.

For the last year, the Great Salt Lake has had a “serious adverse effects” designation, with state leadership worried that further evaporation will lead to the collapse of the lake’s brine shrimp population and economic uses.

If the state can get 250,000 acre-feet of water (81.5 billion gallons) into the lake, Freeze said the lake will stabilize.

In a conversation with the Deseret News on Thursday morning, Freeze described the state of the Great Salt Lake, as well as what she hopes to bring to her new role.

Freeze replaced former Commissioner Brian Steed on July 22, after he accepted a position at Utah State University to serve as vice president for government and external relations.

Working with the lake is nothing new for Freeze.

For the last year, she served as former Commissioner Brian Steed’s deputy, overseeing the agriculture optimization program. She came to the role with more than a decade of experience in the state’s Department of Agriculture and Food, where she worked as a water optimization program manager.

But before that, the Great Salt Lake was a place she’d regularly go.

As a child, Freeze would “take colts out to the lake and work them in the mud to wear them out,” she told the Deseret News. “There were always so many flies, so many bugs, and it smelled terrible.”

“So I kind of chuckle when people are like, ‘We’re going to come see the lake.’ I’m like, alright. Bring a fly mask,” she said with a laugh.

What does the Great Salt Lake commissioner do?

Freeze described the commission’s office to the Deseret News as the quarterback of Utah’s Great Salt Lake team.

“Everybody else is doing all of the things, and we’re just trying to help everybody work together,” she said.

The Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner was created in 2023 with the official task of developing and maintaining a plan to save the lake and coordinate work between all of the pertinent agencies.

A lot of her job is relationship building, Freeze explained. She’ll spend time making connections with chambers of commerce, other states, federal leadership and private entities.

Her office has been moving in a good direction since it was founded, Freeze said, adding that she hopes to continue Steed’s work.

“Brian Steed served for three years and laid a really great foundation,” she said. “There is so much going on in the water game right now — even just with the Great Salt Lake — that we haven’t even given a lot of these ideas a chance to work,” Freeze said.

She referenced recent state legislation that expanded Utah’s water leasing program, which allows farmers to temporarily sell their water rights to the lake. In the next several years, the commission will continue working on the same initiatives.

“The foundation has been laid, so now we’re going to roll forward,” Freeze said.

Optimizing agricultural water use

While Utah’s Department of Agriculture and Food has dabbled in water optimization for quite some time, it really took off in 2019 when the state’s Agricultural Water Optimization Task Force received funding for the first time.

“I think Brian had a lot of foresight in realizing that agriculture needed to be a bigger voice in the space. I really appreciated the opportunity to be that voice,” Freeze said.

There are now close to a thousand water optimization contracts around the state.

“A lot of agricultural irrigation systems were built when the pioneers settled the valley. It’s extremely old infrastructure,” Freeze said. “Water loss in the systems varies, but some of it can lose up to 50%. It’s had a huge impact.”

While Freeze managed the department’s water optimization program, they oversaw $276 million. “We managed those dollars and awarded contracts to producers to implement new systems,” she said.

Some of that money goes toward putting in new piping and replacing old sprinkler systems. Funds also pay for water metering systems, automated surge valves, drip irrigation systems and other new water-efficient tech.

Freeze and her family farm alfalfa in Box Elder County, Utah.

The lake has drawn in national attention

Freeze joined the Deseret News for an interview just after returning from a work trip to Washington, D.C., where she visited with state and federal leadership about the Great Salt Lake and other water issues.

She met with leadership from Idaho, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and elsewhere to “get a pulse on where they’re at with the lake.”

“It was a resounding, ‘Yes, we understand this is an issue, and yes, we want to help,’” Freeze said. She said she walked away from those conversations feeling hopeful.

Utah is not alone in its water issues. “Everywhere in the western United States is in really severe drought,” Freeze said. “Even nationwide, our groundwater is in distress. There are just water issues everywhere.”

In the past year, the issue of the Great Salt Lake has risen to high levels politically. In February, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the federal government would help with the issue.

Then he requested that $1 billion be set aside in the Interior Department’s budget for 2027. State and federal leaders are yet to hammer out the details of where the proposed $1 billion would go.