Although things looked real bad last fall when Governor Herbert and DNR Director Styler gave the public the impression that the agreement would be signed very quickly after public comment this didn’t end up happening. Then at the end of 2009 it looked like the Governor would sign it and now there is some indication that there could be another delay, albeit a short one. One gets the impression that the Governor wants to sign it but is attempting to appease some County officials. The SL Tribune is reporting that based on letters from Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon and the Millard County County Commission that there could be a short delay. The most interesting part of the report is that Las Vegas officials don’t even believe that Snake Valley water would be pumped until 2050. Concerns coming from the Counties include the same general concerns about Wasatch Front Air Quality and some proof that there wouldn’t be irreversible aquifer mining as a result of the diversion.

Currently the BLM is finalizing its draft EIS on the project and reportedly will include estimations about what the aquifer would look like 200 years after the diversion occurs. The models used to predict such estimations of drawdown don’t seem to have much promise in terms of accuracy. The sentiment from scientists is quite direct: “Any forecast 200 years into the future is bulls—,” said Tim Barnett, a physicist and researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “You just can’t do that.” The bottom line is that there is simply no point in being in such a hurry to sign an agreement that is not based on any facts, and that even once the EIS is released it still won’t be much more clear how the aquifer will react to the proposed project. There certainly shouldn’t be a hurry in lieu of the fact that there wouldn’t be any diversion for another 40 years.