A discussion with Jeff Davis regarding aquifer storage and recovery projects. Can they help Utah meet its complex growth and demand patterns?
Transcription:
Brian Lebrecht, President of Clyde Snow & Sessions 0:01
This podcast is brought to you by the law firm of Clyde Snow and Sessions based in Salt Lake City with offices in Oregon and California. For over 65 years Clyde Snow has represented clients throughout the West. Clyde Snow: Serious About Solutions.
Emily Lewis , Host 0:20
Hello, and welcome to Ripple Effect, a podcast putting water into context. I’m Emily Lewis, your host and I’m a water attorney here in Salt Lake City, Utah, practicing creative solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s water problems. Welcome to the conversation.
Hello, and welcome to the 10th episode of Ripple Effect. I’m very excited about today’s conversation. We are going to be discussing some aquifer recovery and storage projects and just some general groundwater hydrology issues with Jeff Davis. Jeff Davis is a senior hydrogeologist with Bar Engineering and currently works in the assessment and remediation unit here in Salt Lake City. The reason I wanted to have Jeff on today is because one of the things we talk a lot about here in Utah is having a multifaceted approach to our water infrastructure and our water planning, and groundwater is just such a key component of that. And it’s doesn’t necessarily get the do and attention that sometimes our surface water development does. And so I thought it’d be really helpful to have someone on the podcast who is an expert in the area, and talk us through some of the specific projects and give us a little better understanding of how we can think about our groundwater differently. So Jeff, if you could please, could you give our listeners a little bit of a background of what kind of projects you typically work in? And kind of what you enjoy about your job? And we’ll go from there.
Jeff Davis, Guest 1:52
Sure. Thanks, Emily. Yeah, my name is Jeff and my educational background, I have degrees in civil and environmental engineering. And I’ve spent most of my 25 plus year career in groundwater related projects. I’ve had the opportunity to work on every single continent except for Antarctica. So I’ve been involved in a lot of really cool projects. I’ve worked in the oil and gas industry, and mining industry mines all over the world. And also for municipalities. I’ve been been involved in ASR aquifer storage type projects across the country and in other countries as well.
Emily Lewis 2:40
Awesome. Great. And Barr also is a multi office engineering firm as well, correct?
Jeff Davis 2:47
Yep. Yeah, based out of Minneapolis, and they have offices and like, kind of 10 different offices across the country.
Emily Lewis 2:55
Okay, awesome. And do you primarily so if you could kind of give us like a little breakdown and kind of like, what is like your day to day look like for your position? What kind of projects do you have come across your desk? You know, what are you doing to kind of move those projects forward? Like what are the skills that you apply to assess what what the requests are from your clients?
Jeff Davis 3:14
Lots of math. So it’s important to do math before in school. But I manage a number of different projects. Right now, most of them are here in Utah, but I have some that are out of state. One is a power client. That’s a coal power plant client of mine. Another one is an oil and gas disposal facility. And but a lot of my projects right now are based here in Utah, and I work for a lot of different water districts, and municipalities. And that ranges from helping them with stormwater or aquifer sustainability. And of course, I have a couple pretty significant aquifer storage projects that I’m working on right now. So each day, I kind of see how those projects are going and then just keep them moving along.
Emily Lewis 4:21
All right. Well, that is a great segue into talking about one in particular. So I am an advocate of the forum that we call LinkedIn. I find it a great way to kind of keep tabs on what’s going on in the water world. You know, I also like to follow random people from all over. And what piqued my curiosity and kind of why I picked you out and sent you an email is that I’m kind of curious about the Riverview Park in Provo, an aquifer recovery and storage project that you guys have going on there. Because it seemed like a really good concrete example to kind of talk about like what a project is kind of from start to finish – what its goals are, and then how you actually go to implementing those goals. And so I was hoping we can maybe use that particular project as a little bit of an example to kind of get us started in the conversation about aquifer storage.
Jeff Davis 5:12
Sure, sure, I would say I’m pretty passionate about a couple of things. And one of them is water. And the city of Provo a couple years ago, had an opportunity to go down this path of looking at developing aqua storage and recovery projects. And so we’ve been working with them for a couple of years now. And we just at Riverview Park, which is kind of toward the north end of the city, we just started, that was our second pilot location that we just started a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been doing much more extensive work at the mouth of Rock Canyon, which is where our first pilot program was, but we’ve been doing a bunch of background research for about a year and a half. And we’re in the kind of the second stage. So when you go through an ASR project, there’s kind of three phases. The first phase is going to be identifying specific candidate sites, that would be a good site for putting water into the ground.
Emily Lewis 6:34
And can I just – so basically, the municipality approaches you first and they say, “Hey, we’re looking at building in some resiliency, or we’re worried about our aquifer yields,” – before we get to the specific projects, like what are the goals the municipality is trying to meet by even pursuing one of these projects in the first place?
Jeff Davis 6:51
Yes, yeah, so the city faces two challenges, which is not uncommon, with other cities out here in the West, and particularly in Utah. And that is growing population with IE increased water demand. And a forecast that looks like water is going to be a challenge. So shoring up those water supplies for a growing community. The city of Provo is just over 100,000 people right now and they’re expected to not quite double by 2060. And a lot of cities are in that same boat. And the other thing that they noticed is over the last several decades, their groundwater levels have been slowly declining. And in some areas, you know, faster and others, but consistently across the board, all of their wells show annual declines year after year after year. So they recognize let’s look to the future. How are we going to get there? How are we going to have a sustainable water supply for our growing population?
Emily Lewis 6:51
Yeah, and understanding that groundwater is a key component of that. Yeah, great. We were about to break into the three phases of a project before I so rudely interrupted you. So yeah, if you could kind of walk us through kind of like, you know, now that a municipality is identified that this is a potential tool for them to shore up their supply and meet coming demand, what’s the next step for them getting involved in a project?
Jeff Davis 8:31
Yeah, and I, and I guess I should say too, for those that may not really understand, you know, aquifer storage, you know, I listened to like one of your previous talks with when you had Brian on and he was talking to kind of about the water cycle here in Utah. We get most of our water because it snows in the mountains and then it melts, and we try and capture that. So we have lots of reservoirs and then we build storage tanks. And one of the big issues you get with reservoirs is you get a lot of loss through evaporation. So instead of taking, you know building a dam and storing water on the surface, you can take water and put it in the ground.
Emily Lewis 9:18
There’s also some water quality benefits typically too, right? That’s a good, potentially.
Jeff Davis 9:22
Sure, sure. But you also know and I can talk, you know, later on in this process, can’t just put willy nilly water in the ground and go “okay we’re gonna store it” because there are a lot of guidelines and regulations from the state that wants to be very protective of those pristine water supplies that are deep in the ground. So, you know, going back to this kind of first phase, this investigative phase of “Okay, what are our options of putting water in the ground and where best, could we do that?” And there’s really two different ways of doing that. And that is infiltrating on the ground surface or injecting it deep in the ground. And so those are the kind of the those are the two basic forms of putting water in the ground. And so we went through this exercise where we have some geophysical studies, we did a lot of groundwater modeling. And we looked at existing maps and data. And we came up with a bunch of candidate sites, or infiltrating on the surface, and then deep injecting.
Emily Lewis 10:43
So probably looked at both options?
Jeff Davis 10:45
Yep, yeah. Both options. And there’s advantages and disadvantages of both. And there’s costs for both.
Emily Lewis 10:54
So what would be an advantage or a disadvantage compared between the two techniques?
Jeff Davis 10:58
Okay, so an advantage of surface infiltration is typically your pretreatment is going to be a lot less, meaning you’re going to use the earth as kind of that filter of filtering the water. And as it goes down deep into the ground to the aquifers, and you’re going to use that if there’s any type of cleaning of the water that needs to be done. But the disadvantage of that is, it could be more difficult to get that water to actually go where you want. Meaning if I’m putting on the ground surface, does it actually get deep enough into the ground to my aquifer storage.
Emily Lewis 11:44
And so to find that out, do you do like, I’m assuming you must do some kind of like study of looking at how things are faulting and what kind of layers are down there. Like, that’s the geologist side of your hydrogeology?
Jeff Davis 11:55
Exactly. And so that’s what we’ve been doing. And so we came up with, you know, maybe a couple of dozen sites, and we paired that down to five sites. And three of them were infiltration sites, and two of them were would be injection sites where you would inject the water directly down into the rock. And when we found when we decided on those five sites, and then we started doing more investigative work to determine, okay, is this you know, is this really going to be a candidate site? That all leads up to a point where you’re going to permit with the state, a pilot program. So you say, okay, I’ve done X amount of information and research and study. Now we’d like to kind of test our theory at this site. And if the test comes back positive, we would then like to apply for a final permit project to do that.
Emily Lewis 13:02
And so what are the agencies that you have to get like regulatory approval for to even get to the pilot stage?
Jeff Davis 13:06
So here in the state of Utah, that’s three its the division of water rights. And they oversee what water are you using? And do you have the rights to that water?
Emily Lewis 13:21
Do you have to change application to basically move in existing water right?
Jeff Davis 13:25
You could you may have to, you may not. Okay, so the division of water rights is one agency because they kind of oversee who owns the water and what you’re doing with it. Then there’s the division of water quality, and they’re in charge of if you’re putting water, say on the ground, then you’re typically going to have to have what’s called a groundwater discharge permit, because they want to know, you know, what you’re doing with that water and kind of the chemical makeup of that. And then finally, the division of drinking water, and they’re in charge of making sure that everybody gets clean drinking water. So if you’re going to be involved in an aquifer storage project where you’re putting water on the surface, or injecting it down into the aquifer, they want to make sure that whatever you’re doing that you’re not having any detrimental effects.
Emily Lewis 14:26
As a side note, those three agencies right now are overseen by three very formidable women. And so I think it’s very important to recognize that as well.
Jeff Davis 14:36
And it’s awesome! Teresa and Erica and Maria have been fantastic to work with. It is you know, Utah’s got a lot of things going for them and for it and you’ve done a remarkable job, you know, through this COVID event, but it has been really it’s really cool to see that we do have those three heading up those agencies. So yeah, it was pretty cool.
Emily Lewis 15:02
I love to make note of that.
Jeff Davis 15:05
Yeah, it is great to work with them.
Emily Lewis 15:08
Okay, so you’ve kind of taken us now through like the investigatory stage, you’ve identified your pilot projects, you’ve kind of narrowed it down. Now, I’m assuming we’re moving into kind of two, which is the permitting stage. So you’ve worked with the state agencies.
Jeff Davis 15:21
Yeah. And, and we’ve taken all that information that we’ve gathered, and we basically present it to the state. And we say, we’re ready to do our piloting, our further testing, you know, kind of test out this scenario, to see if it works, based on current up to date, knowledge of all the things the studies and tests that we’ve done. Now we’re ready to kind of at a smaller scale, put it into play.
Emily Lewis 15:49
Great.
Jeff Davis 15:50
And we got those permits the end of last year. And then this year, we’ve been preparing for those piloting programs. And again, we finished our kind of round one at Rock Canyon. And we started round one at Riverview Park. And those are both infiltration type ASR programs.
Emily Lewis 16:16
So when you say infiltration, like physically, what does that look like? Like if I wanted to come visit your project, what would I see?
Jeff Davis 16:25
So for Rock Canyon, what we did is after we put in multiple monitoring wells, and that’s just basically a well hole into the ground, that we can measure both the water levels and the water quality as we put water on the ground. We installed those wells, we took, in this case, culinary water, and we piped it up to a tank, and then we released it into the Rock Canyon dry creek bed.
Emily Lewis 17:06
Okay, so this is an existing natural creek bed like you guys didn’t do any improvements or anything?
Jeff Davis 17:10
It was an existing creek bed and, so the prior year, we had done some studies to measure the snow runoff and we had gauges in and we actually had water that was running out of the canyon. This year, we thought we would have the same but it turns out that we did not end up getting any kind of water, snow, water melt runoff in the canyon. So prior to that runoff, we discharge water in the creek at different rates and for different lengths of time. And then we monitored the water on the surface. And then we monitored it in the wells to see okay, where’s it going? How fast is the water getting into the into the lower aquifers? And then we would test that water and say, “Okay, here’s what the water looked like before, and during, and after our test.”
Emily Lewis 18:09
What depths are these aquifers? Are we talking about 100 feet, 300 feet thousands of feet?
Jeff Davis 18:14
So at the canyon, as you get up close to the mountains, if you can kind of picture out in the valley, you have aquifers at different depths. And in Utah County, they may be a couple hundred feet, and then you may have another one that’s like another couple hundred feet down below that. And then you have some that are deep out by Utah Lake, those aquifers are down, you know, 1400, 1500, 1600 feet below. And they’re pretty flat, you know, in the middle of the valley. But then as you go closer to the mountains, those aquifers, you know, you can kind of think of them as as layers.
Emily Lewis 18:58
Are those reticular layers? I love that term.
Jeff Davis 19:02
Yeah, as they get closer to the mountains, they kind of go upwards. And so at the mouths of the canyons, or you know, long mountains, you have much better access to those lower aquifers because the water comes in, it infiltrates and then it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper until it gets out to the middle of the valley.
Emily Lewis 19:25
Kind of like a natural pathway that you’re exacerbating.
Jeff Davis 19:29
Exactly.
Emily Lewis 19:31
And so, before we go, could you talk about the the park project? I just had a quick question. So this is existing culinary water that’s already part of Provo City’s municipal water supply.
Jeff Davis 19:44
Yes.
Emily Lewis 19:45
So where does their general water supply come from? Are we pumping one groundwater well, to put it back in another section? I hadn’t thought about that perspective before.
Jeff Davis 19:56
So yeah, for our piloting we recommended or we, you know, we proposed to the state that we were going to use culinary water for the pilot in it at Rock Canyon. In title design, we’re actually going to use water from the Provo River, and we’re gonna have Provo River water up. But Provo, like many cities along the Wasatch Front, not all but most cities along the Wasatch Front, generally gets their water from springs, and wells. And so in the wintertime when the demand is low, most of Provo is supplied by a few mountain springs.
Emily Lewis 20:45
And you say low because we don’t have outdoor watering, correct?
Jeff Davis 20:49
Yeah. And then as things warm up, and we come into the growing season, and the water demand goes up. Then Provo turns on their groundwater wells, and they have groundwater wells that are scattered throughout their city, from the north end to the south end. And those wells begin pumping in the summer months. And then as soon as the growing season, people stop watering outside, then that stops. A lot of cities are that way.
Emily Lewis 21:22
Yeah, yeah. Especially here in the Wasatch Front. You know, we like to water.
Jeff Davis 21:27
Yes. And, you know, and I can probably interject, you know, one of my pet peeves. I’ve done a lot of water type projects and work here. And I’ve done things for the State that are water related. And, you know, one of my big pet peeves is all of the culinary use that we use outside. So we’ve treated water, and we water our grass with that. We do that too much here in Utah. And we really ought to stop doing that.
Emily Lewis 21:59
Yeah. Well, at some point I will have an episode solely on secondary metering, you know, its benefits and its drawbacks. I love to have a Weber Basin person on to talk about their project, because it’s been so successful. But, you know, it just is one of those consequences of I think one thing that people don’t realize is, we talk a lot about how Utah’s per capita water use is so high and how our water rates are so cheap, but a lot of that really comes down to like where you’re sitting and what you’re doing and kind of like what your history is, you know? And we have a lot of very – woth the way we’re situated with a mountain source, you know, in a valley floor, cheap, deliverable water.
Jeff Davis 22:34
That is pretty much we’ve hit our limit on that.
Emily Lewis 22:37
Yeah, we have.
Jeff Davis 22:39
There’s already enough evidence that not only we hit that limit, that limit is getting less and less and less every year. Water is not going to be cheaper, water is only going to be more expensive.
Emily Lewis 22:53
Yeah, I had an episode a while back with John Crandall and Laura Briefer about water financing. And that was John’s big takeaway for me was that, you know, the price of water is just going to continue to get more expensive. And my big takeaway from Laura was the price of bringing that water to people is just gonna get more expensive.
Jeff Davis 23:11
Yeah, yeah. And even with Provo, you know, their springs, that’s pretty cheap water, because it’s gravity fed comes down gets in their distribution system. Anytime you have to turn on a pump and pump water from the ground up to the surface, you know that’s expensive.
Emily Lewis 23:32
Yeah. Which brings us to then, you know, if we’re talking about aquifer storage, I like to talk a little bit about you have your two projects, you had the one at Rock Canyon, and then the one at Riverview Park, how different are those two projects? Are they kind of the same concepts just in different locations? Or do they, you know, are there different flavors of aquifer recovery storage projects?
Jeff Davis 23:53
You know, they’re the same in that they’re both infiltration, we’re on the ground and have it seep into the ground, and store that in the ground below, but the geology is quite different. And so the challenges can be different as well. And so, we picked Riverview, partly because of our study, and partly because before we got involved, the Park Service had created a water feature within their park
Emily Lewis 24:29
And that’s a municipal park service?
Jeff Davis 24:31
Yeah. And then they diverted a little bit of water from the Provo river to fill up this little water feature. And try as they might, the water would just infiltrate into the ground.
Emily Lewis 24:46
So they already beat you! They’ve beaten you to it.
Jeff Davis 24:50
This really isn’t that much of a water feature because we can’t keep water in there. Or they ended up lining the water feature. so that they could have a nice little water feature in their park for the residents. So we had that knowledge going in. And since then we had done some geophysical tests there, we had drilled some monitoring wells there. And we really liked that. And we ended up making some modifications to that water feature, so that the water would actually go in back into the ground. And so just about, not quite two weeks ago, we started that same process. So we go, and we take water samples of the deep aquifers, and we analyze that water. So we look at all the chemical makeup of that before we started. And then we started diverting water, pump water through this water feature. And we have people that everyday look at it and go, okay, you know, it’s 9am, this is how far the waters gone. And this how much water we’re pumping. Then we measure the water levels in the wells that are scattered throughout the park to try to see, okay, where’s the water going and is it mounding up? Is infiltrating down low? So we’ve been doing that for a couple weeks.
Emily Lewis 26:20
So then for these projects, if we’re doing AAR, the “S” is storage, what are the acre foot volumes we’re talking about for these two projects? Do you guys have a set goal in terms of how much you actually want to store? Or are you just trying to figure out what the capabilities are?
Jeff Davis 26:36
Yeah, right now we’re just at the capability stage, and then drawing conclusions. So after our piloting, then we compile all that information and then we take it to the state, those same three agencies, and we say, “Okay, now we want to permit a full scale project. And we want to do it at all five of these sites, or we just want to do this particular site.” And this is what we want to do. And it’s based on all of this science that we’ve been performing, gathering over the last previous few years.
Emily Lewis 27:18
But I mean, is it gonna be like 20 acre foot pockets of water 600 acre feet? I mean, do you have any concept when you go into it? You know?
Jeff Davis 27:30
Yeah, I would say that at this stage, we have some ideas of what we’d like to store. And a lot of it is comes back to “Okay, where are we going to get the water?” And, you know, what are our water rights? And then what are our demands? Because let’s say you had a demand of 10, it doesn’t really make sense to create, you know, and I’m saying 10-30 years from now, or 60 years from now, it doesn’t make sense to, to build a project, that’s, you know, 100 times bigger than that. It doesn’t make sense to make a project 10 times smaller than that. So you kind of look at your long range planning, and you look what water that you might have available, and then you plan a project accordingly.
Emily Lewis 28:28
Great. Well, and that kind of leads me to another question that I had. And kind of one of the reasons I want to have you on here is I really want to talk about these two projects, because I think that anything in water is just so much more helpful when you have a specific example. If we’re talking about agricultural efficiencies, I want to know exactly what they mean when they say that, like are you talking about a drip system? Are you talking about like crop rotation? What are you talking about? And so, I think that I wanted to have these two examples as kind of a good way to walk through the specifics of what aquifer recovery is. But then I also want to talk about, like, how does this fit into our big picture water planning? Especially here in Utah, are these scalable projects? Are these something that you know, we can really look to? If you listen to my conversation with Brian, one of the things that he really talked about, and this is also something that Laura Briefer mentioned quite regularly is our need to rethink our infrastructure and not just have it be gray infrastructure in the terms of concrete but green infrastructure in terms of using our natural systems. And I kind of flippantly mentioned the gravel pit at the mouth of Big Cottonwood but also not that flippantly like, I’m serious, I’m like, that’s the mouth of our Canyon. Is that a potential place to put an aquifer recovery storage project? So like, what is the ability to scale these up for Utah?
Jeff Davis 29:44
Yeah, and they can be scaled up. Now, you know, there’s less than a dozen current ASR projects here in Utah right now, and only a handful of those are actually currently operating. And if you look, you know, I’ve been involved in SSR projects in California and Texas and Florida and you know, in other states, and some of those, especially like some in Florida and Texas, are massive. San Antonio is our project is really, really big. So, so they’re definitely, definitely scalable. And I’m sure, you know, some or most of your listeners are familiar with Governor Herbert’s water strategy document that commissioned you know, back in 2017. And ASR was studied and talked about and presented as a principle that we should be doing more here in Utah. And we really ought to try. I think it’s, it’s less likely that we’re going to build more dams here. They’re expensive, there’s a lot of evaporative losses, and there’s a lot of environmental resistance to that. So how can we be more efficient in storing water when we have it? Especially in good, strong years of heavy snow. You know, why can’t we do better in capturing that water and storing it for future years? And that’s something like Weber Basin does. So Weber Basin has an ASR project at the mouth of Weber Basin. And that’s kind of their intent to capture that.
Emily Lewis 31:30
So we have like a 2011, where we had just off the charts water, you know, instead of spilling our dams, we can put it somewhere.
Jeff Davis 31:36
That’s right. And so our state regulatory personnel, they have a pretty good appetite for that type of ASR project, where they don’t have a particular appetite for on ASR projects, that is using storm water and/or wastewater as part of the ASR picture. That’s where we are behind other states. Other states have already been doing that, both on stormwater and wastewater, for ASR type projects. And we’ll get there. And part of the long term projects in Provo is to build an advanced treatment facility that takes wastewater, and treats it to a level that it can be reused. You know, so reuse is kind of a whole other topic that we have a lot of experience with. And we’re working with a few other municipalities here in Utah on water reuse. But that could be and should be part of the ASR message, you know, going forward.
Emily Lewis 33:02
Yeah. And I want to follow up on something you said there, too, because, you know, the stormwater side, it’s also really relevant, because we’re going to have more increased crazy storm events, you know. And so I think that one of the purposes of having this discussion, the purposes of having discussions about future planning are trying to be accurate and fitting into the environment that is coming. The reality is, is we’re going to have large storm events, we’re not going to have regular cycles like we used to. And so taking advantage of that water, so that it doesn’t just go down our highway drainages down into the Jordan. And I also have to say one other thing about reuse. I’m a huge advocate of exploring reuse. The other thing, though, is Utah so dry that we live in a very interconnected web of water. And so one of the things to think about is if we put in our reuse in the ground that water is not being discharged into a body like the Jordan, and our return flows.
Jeff Davis 33:58
It is complicated. And that’s why we have attorneys.
Emily Lewis 34:02
Yes. Well, attorneys who have wonderful working partners, who are scientists and mathematicians and geologists, hydrogeologists, because we all have to work together for sure. Because otherwise it’s just gonna be a mess.
Jeff Davis 34:15
It is – everything changes. The idea with stormwater used to be divert it and get it away, put it away and put it far downstream. Now the regulations and the idea are, keep it on site. Keep it local, that presents challenges and a lot of the cities and municipalities are now learning about those challenges as the regulations for stormwater control are changing.
Emily Lewis 34:42
Yeah. And this has come up a couple times in our podcasts as well. It’s not just regulations, but it’s also land use planning. Our land use needs doses to kind of encourage those kind of projects as well, so that we can meet the meet the regulations. Great. Well, Jeff, that honestly covered a lot of my main questions but you know, I’d love to give you a moment to add any other comments or thoughts you have about ASR projects or things that you didn’t get a chance to cover that you think are important for the listeners to know or just a free forum moment.
Jeff Davis 35:15
No, you know, like I said, there’s there’s several projects already running up north up in Brigham City. Weber, at the mouth of Weber Canyon, you can look at that. You can go down to Provo, you could go to Riverview Park, and you can see what’s going on there. You could go to Rock Canyon, we have a nice little informative sign for people to read about. But yeah, like I said, I’m pretty passionate. Yesterday, I spent like the entire day at Riverview Park. And people were like, what are you doing? Or, Hey, can you tell me what’s going on here? And, you know, usually my colleagues go, “Okay, here goes Jeff, he’s gonna go off.” You know, I am excited about the project. But really, I think ASR plays a critical role. You know, most people probably don’t recognize, but Sand Hollow reservoir down in Hurricane in Washington County, is an ASR project for Washington County, they get that water, they divert it to the Sand Hollow. And that infiltrates into the ground into their offers where they can store that water. So you know, a lot of times people go, “Oh, I just thought that was a cool place to boat and swim and enjoy that water.” But that is actually part of their aquifer storage program for Washington County.
Emily Lewis 36:51
Awesome. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s a cool piece. And I think that exploring all the little pieces are going to get us the big quilt of what we need to do. You know, this is kind of why that why I wanted to do this podcast is, you know, unpacking these little pieces, you start talking about like the water rights, do we have the water rights for that, once you understand the project, you can understand the legal construct, you know, once you have an idea of the project, you have to understand the regulatory construct in terms of permitting, and so I think this is a really helpful kind of component of the discussion.
Jeff Davis 37:23
Yeah, sure. And, you know, at some time, it’s a little burdensome, to fulfill all those requirements. I mean, you might say, jump through those hoops. But really, they’re there to protect the citizens, to protect the water rights of citizens who owns water, they’re there to protect, so everybody has clean drinking water, when they turn on their tap, they have some confidence that it’s going to be clean. So they just, you know, they’re very supportive. All three agencies are very supportive of aquifer storage programs. They’re just there to be protective of the people of Utah.
Emily Lewis 38:06
Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a great discussion. I’m really excited about it. And I definitely would love to have you back again to talk about stormwater or talk about some other items.
Jeff Davis 38:16
I’d be happy to.
Emily Lewis 38:19
Alright, I will do that. Great. Well, thank you so much.
Jeff Davis 38:23
Okay, thank you.
Brian Lebrecht 38:38
Nothing’s said in this podcast should be taken as providing legal advice or as establishing an attorney client relationship with you or anyone else.
MacKenzie Nickles, Podcast Producer 38:45
This podcast was produced by Mackenzie Nickles. Find Ripple Effect on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai