The LDS church has received approval from Utah’s Division of Water Rights to drill 20 wells to dewater the site of the future Heber Valley temple, a key step to prepare for construction.
The drilling follows a Utah Supreme Court ruling that lets construction proceed, even as a lawsuit over the legality of the plans continues.
Residents near the temple site on Center Street, east of downtown Heber, cited dewatering and other environmental concerns in their lawsuit.
A groundwater study from 2023, when Wasatch County was reviewing the temple plans, estimated the church would need to pump up to 1 million gallons of water every day to prepare the site.
Hugh Hurlow is the Groundwater and Wetlands Program Manager at the Utah Geological Survey. He said although the number of gallons seems large, the dewatering project is relatively small in scale.
“It might have a local effect, like on the neighbors, but it wouldn’t – individually, by itself – contribute to much [of] any measurable change,” he said.
Scientists typically talk about water in terms of acre-feet – the volume required to cover an acre of flat land in water one foot deep. A 2020 study of the Heber Valley’s groundwater “budget” estimated over 78,000 acre-feet move through the system each year. The pumping required to dewater the temple site will be a fraction of that number, roughly 1 to 3 acre-feet per day.
Jim Goddard, who manages the groundwater program at the Utah Division of Water Rights, said that scale of pumping is unlikely to have big effects on water in the Heber Valley.
“What we see with dewatering projects is, even though they’re dewatering, we don’t really see much impairment of other people’s water rights, because the amount of water that’s being removed is minimal,” he said. “There’s not really a sustained or a widespread impact to the groundwater system because of these dewatering projects.”
Construction projects that involve dewatering must comply with a set of state requirements. Builders also must ensure the pumped water doesn’t pollute the rivers or reservoirs where it’s released.
“If you’re discharging fluids into a natural system, it has to be equal or greater quality than what it’s going into,” Goddard said.
The temple’s dewatering application says water will be pumped into large tanks, then discharged into Lake Creek just south of the site.
Although the temple project may not have a large impact on its own, Hurlow said it’s important to think about the health of a whole region’s groundwater.
“The problem, of course, is: what if you have 1,000 or more of this kind of proposed pumping?” he said.
In Wasatch County, some locals are calling on leaders to pay more attention to the long-term health of the valley’s water supply.
Heber City resident Steve Lorenc founded the Heber Valley Aquifer Alliance, a group that’s trying to make groundwater science understandable to the average person.
“Living in a desert climate, you start looking at the amount of development that’s going on, you look at what’s going on across the state and the Western region and realize that water is becoming a critical natural resource,” he said.
Lorenc said it’s important for leaders to look at the cumulative impacts of development.
“Whether it’s The Slope, the bypass, the LDS temple project, they tend to look at each project in a silo,” he said.
The Slope is one of the large residential and commercial developments planned near the intersection of U.S. 40 and River Road.
Water rights are administered and tracked at the state level. Wasatch County manager Dustin Grabau said the county requires a project to show it has adequate water rights before construction can begin. It also tries to connect new developments to existing water systems to avoid drilling too many wells.
“The county only has so much discretion,” Grabau said. “We are obligated to abide by state law, and we try to use local codes within those restrictions to ensure that we’re being as careful as is prudent with development in the county.”
The church does not need to own the rights to the water it’s pumping, since it’s not keeping or using it.
Overall, Hurlow said the Heber Valley’s groundwater supply is healthy. Data from the Utah Geological Survey shows a well near the temple site has declined at a rate of about 0.3 feet per year over the past 30 years.
“If it was 10 times that, then you would start to worry,” he said.
However, groundwater draining is a significant issue statewide. Goddard said in many areas of Utah, the Division of Water Rights is keeping a watchful eye on the health of aquifers.
Over 90% of the state was in drought as of mid-February, which can be a bellwether for problems underground.
“It’s a huge concern with our office, because we regulate both surface water and groundwater,” Goddard said. “There may be a little bit more time lag before you see that impact on groundwater, but it’s still happening – and it’s been happening.”
Despite a large mid-February storm that swept through the state, scientists predict Utah has just a 10% chance of reaching a normal snowpack peak this winter.
