SALT LAKE CITY -- New water supplies, including the Bear River, will be needed to quench the thirst of fast-growing suburbs around Salt Lake City in the coming decades, according to a state report released Tuesday.
Without fresh supplies, a worst-case estimate found, supply will fall short of demand by 2027.
But several planned steps -- including siphoning water from the Bear and Colorado rivers and better use of water already available -- should help supply water for the Salt Lake Valley for the coming decades, said Todd Stonely, the river basin planning chief for the state Division of Water Resources.
"It looks like we'll be OK for the next 50 years," Stonely said.
The report is one in a series of comprehensive examinations of future water supplies for Utah's 11 major hydrological basins.
The Jordan River basin supplies Salt Lake County with water from mountain snowpack and high-elevation lakes. It's one of Utah's wettest basins, with about 23 inches of precipitation a year, but it is also the most crowded.
The county is expected to see sharp growth, doubling its population by 2060 to more than 2 million residents, according to state estimates.
While Salt Lake City itself is only expected to grow from 181,000 in 2000 to 226,000 in 2060, suburbs are projected to expand rapidly. Herriman, the most dramatic example, is forecast to jump from 1,500 people in 2000 to more than 82,000 in 2060.
Making sure those homes and businesses have ample water -- and keeping environmental degradation in check -- will be no small chore.
Water managers in the valley have already been pushing conservation toward a goal of reducing use by 25 percent by 2050. So far, they say, the effort has been fairly successful.
But conservation and other measures to squeeze more out of the existing supply "will not be enough to satisfy all future needs," the report said.
Eventually, the Bear River project -- a long-proposed plan to tap into the Northern Utah river and send some of the water south along the Wasatch Front -- will be needed, the report said.
More water will also be needed from the Central Utah Project funneling water from the Uinta Basin to the Wasatch Front.
Authorized in 1956, the project would eventually deliver more than 100,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water per year to Utah's most populated area, roughly enough to meet the demands of about 100,000 households.
It's already supplying about 80,000 acre-feet, and project construction is expected to be finished around 2020.
Stonely said the expected thirst in the Salt Lake Valley can be quenched in other ways, too, in the coming decades: a movement toward less farming, which will free up water used for irrigation; reinjecting excess water into an underground aquifer for use later; and increased efforts for water reuse.
"There's not just one thing, like the Bear River project, that's going to satisfy this," he said.
State water officials will take comments on their Jordan River basin water plan at a March 30 meeting in Salt Lake City.
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