2 views of Lake Powell: 'insurance policy,' outdated

Dan McCool, director of the American West Center at the University of Utah and a political science professor, said the dam is "the monument to that era," the 1950s.

It was a time when people tried to think big and conquer nature, he said. The dam is like a 1956 Cadillac, a heavy car with big tail fins that got about 10 miles per gallon.

Dam builders like to point out that they built for 700 years, he said. "Think how much society changes in 700 years," McCool said. "Now we have a dam that was built in another era for another purpose."

He argued that the thinking behind the Colorado River Compact, which regulates the dam systems, was flawed. The dams were built with the notion that yeoman farmers would settle the West, the way they did places like Ohio.

Today, the West is settled, and "we don't have a problem with trying to attract more people here," he said. And farmers working 160 acres did not materialize. Instead, McCool said, most of the water today goes to "big corporate irrigators" who take advantage of the subsidies provided in the form of inexpensive water underwritten by taxpayer subsidies.

He blasted dams like Glen Canyon as "economically dysfunctional projects." More of the water goes to grow alfalfa than any other crop, he said.

"If we had an open market for water, I think the water could be worth more than the alfalfa," McCool added. Farming uses 80 percent of Utah's water, yet farming is only about 2 percent of the economy.

If wasteful agricultural water subsidies were eliminated there would be plenty of water to go around, according to McCool.

"We do not have a water crisis in Utah," he said. "We have a water management crisis."

Richard Ingebretsen — director of the board of trustees of the Glen Canyon Institute, associate professor of physics at the U. and professor of medicine at the university's School of Medicine — questioned the need for Glen Canyon Dam.

Environmental costs are not weighed as they should be when considering whether the dam should exist, he said. Lake Powell is accumulating silt so fast that Hite Marina can no longer be used. "Pretty soon it'll be Bullfrog."

He said eventually Lake Powell will no longer be useful for water storage. Water could be stored elsewhere, such as in underground aquifers, he said. Why not look at getting rid of its dam now, Ingebretsen asked, "when we can restore Glen Canyon?"

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