Utah has partnered with a conservative group to save the Great Salt Lake.
The Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, is a Montana-based, nonprofit think tank that names itself “the national leader in market solutions for conservation.” The group is a member of the State Policy Network, a nationwide organization of conservative think tanks.
The partnership aims to facilitate voluntary water leasing — the state would pay farmers, irrigation companies and water districts in the Great Salt Lake Basin for their water — to prop up the dying lake.
“We’re trying to figure out how to get enough water to the lake on a market, voluntary basis,” said Tim Davis, Utah’s deputy Great Salt Lake commissioner. “We’re happy to use and look at whatever information [PERC] or others are willing to provide us as we’re analyzing the best ways to most efficiently use the resources we have to get water to the lake.”
PERC — which has taken money from Exxonmobil and a host of conservative donors — suggests market-based incentives, like water leasing, are better solutions than “heavy-handed mandates or forced reductions,” according to a release about the partnership.
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with the State of Utah to develop a tool that will prioritize voluntary water transfers, compensate users fairly, and restore historic lake levels,” said Brian Yablonski, PERC’s CEO.
Its last report on Utah, comparing recreation on state and federal lands, included inaccurate data.
A flawed report on Utah land
The group was founded in 1980 in Bozeman, Mont., according to its website, to research market solutions to environmental problems, and credits itself with creating “free market environmentalism.”
PERC has received funding from conservative groups like the Charles Koch Foundation, Adolph Coors Foundation and Dunn Foundation, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive, Wisconsin-based watchdog and advocacy group, based on IRS filings.
The group has also received funding from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund that calls itself “a principled philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors.”
The recent partnership concerning the Great Salt Lake is not PERC’s first foray into Utah.
PERC was also behind a 2016 report, titled “Access Divided: State and Federal Recreational Management in the West,” published with the Sutherland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank based in Salt Lake City.
The report used data from the National Association of State Park Directors to measure “state park visits per acre,” a measure PERC and the Sutherland Institute used to examine the impact of transferring federal lands to states on recreational activities like hiking, mountain biking and off-roading.
But PERC and Sutherland mismatched state visitation data, an investigation from the environmental nonprofit Center for Western Priorities found. The groups attributed Washington state park visitation numbers to Utah, incorrectly bolstering the Beehive State’s annual state park visitation tenfold.
That led the report to conclude that Utah’s state parks got more visits per acre than national parks.
A spokesperson for PERC called the error an “oversight” in an email.
“We immediately updated the report and acknowledged the correction,” she said. “The oversight did not affect the overall discussion or report conclusions.”
When The Tribune asked the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner about the report, a spokesperson wrote in an email that “PERC’s information will just be one data point out of many that we will be using to make decisions for the lake.”
“We’re looking to build relationships across the board, and the more we do that, the better for the lake,” the spokesperson added.
Creating water markets and no more national parks
In the land management space, PERC has called for a moratorium on designating national parks. The group’s former executive director, Reed Watson, wrote that the U.S. Department of Interior’s struggle to manage national parks and other federal lands should prevent it from acquiring more in a 2015 op-ed for The New York Times.
“Adding more land to the federal estate is irresponsible when the government is failing to maintain the parks, forests and grazing lands it currently owns,” Watson penned.
“True conservation is taking care of the land and water you already have, not insatiably acquiring more and hoping it manages itself,” the op-ed continued.
PERC believes that leveraging water markets is the solution to managing water scarcity in the drought-stricken West.
The group wrote a policy brief asking Congress to allow Native American tribes to lease water rights off of their reservations. President Joe Biden approved legislation authorizing such leasing for Colorado River tribes in Arizona, California and Nevada in January 2023.
PERC also claimed in an annual report that their op-eds in the Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune helped persuade lawmakers to pass HB33: Instream Water Flow Amendments in 2022. HB33 expanded the definition of beneficial water use, enabling water leasing for the Great Salt Lake.
Beyond water, PERC has worked on issues ranging from incentivizing the adoption of wild horses and burros to wildfire mitigation in national forests.
‘A promising avenue’
To get back to a healthy level — with intact islands, thriving ecosystems and covered lakebeds — the Great Salt Lake’s elevation should reach between 4,198 and 4,205 feet above sea level, according to the Utah Department of Natural Resources.
The lake hasn’t hit that healthy range since 2002.
Voluntary water leasing is “a promising avenue to increase water flows to the lake,” according to PERC and the Utah Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner.
Water rights are privately held, like property rights. To temporarily lease water, water rights holders can enter voluntary partnerships with another entity, like the state. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for instance, donated 20,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake in 2023.
Katherine Wright, principal investigator for the partnership and a senior researcher for PERC, said that agricultural optimization can free up water to transport to the Great Salt Lake. Farmers who have implemented more efficient irrigation technology, for example, could lease their water to the state.
“It’s worth thinking through voluntary transfers to see if we can allow individuals to be compensated for conserving the lake instead of viewing it as a cost,” she said, “which, at times, regulation can feel like from the perspective of water rights holders.”
Davis said that the state’s first contact with PERC was through Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed, who had previously worked with the group.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed in March, PERC agreed to build a dataset to find water rights holders that would be good candidates for voluntary leasing. PERC said it would use publicly available information, like from the Utah Division of Water Rights and Division of Water Resources, and hydrologic data.
PERC also intends to develop a ranking system to identify water that could most conveniently and cost-effectively be transported to the Great Salt Lake. Finally, PERC will create a digital platform to make it easier to find water leasing opportunities.
“We’re really trying to help people get an additional source of revenue while doing something that’s good for the lake,” Davis said.
Using PERC’s information is voluntary, Davis said. The commissioner’s office is not paying PERC for its work.
Davis confirmed that funding for voluntary water leasing will come from the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust and the commissioner’s office, as well as $40 million appropriated to the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, one of the state agencies that manages the lake.
Wright added that environmental nonprofits can also fund voluntary water leases.
Paying water users to use their water for environmental concerns isn’t new. Arizona, California and Nevada in 2023 agreed to cut their Colorado River water use in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities, said that market-based solutions, like incentivizing water conservation with public funds, can work to an extent. “But we have to ask how far that can get us, how much it’s going to cost us and for how long,” he said.
“We have to have big, hard conversations about what this is going to cost in the long term to come up with a sustainable solution for the Great Salt Lake,” Weiss added.
The memorandum of understanding between PERC and the commissioner’s office will remain in place until March 2025 and can be renewed.