Sanpete fed up with delays on dam

FAIRVIEW, Sanpete County — Getting a dam and reservoir approved and built can take a long time.

But an effort to build what is now known as the Narrows Project, a water storage facility serving northern Sanpete County, has been bogged in federal bureaucracy for 70 years, Sanpete leaders said Wednesday at a press conference at the proposed dam site.

Sanpete County Commissioner Claudia Jarrett contended that a dispute with Carbon County over whether Carbon or Sanpete County has legal rights to water that would be stored in the reservoir was resolved in Sanpete's favor more than a decade ago.

"There has been a right denied, and therefore justice has been denied," she said. "Sanpete County has been denied its right to 5,400 acre feet of water for too many years."

The effort to build the dam and reservoir goes back to the 1930s when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed a comprehensive water storage system called the Gooseberry Project.

The project, designed to serve both Sanpete and Carbon, included expanding Scofield Reservoir in Carbon County, building a transmountain tunnel to bring water from Carbon County west into Sanpete and building a dam and reservoir in northwestern Sanpete to store the water.

From the beginning, the glitch has been that Gooseberry Creek, the source for the proposed reservoir, is on the eastern slope of the Wasatch Plateau. Although the stream is inside Sanpete County's border, it naturally runs east into Carbon, emptying into a stream that flows into Scofield.

Nonetheless, according to a chronology released at the press conference, in 1943 the federal government and two Carbon County water agencies signed what is known as the Tripartite Agreement acknowledging Sanpete County's right to the Gooseberry water. Then in 1946, the Scofield Dam started to fail. The federal government was worried that if the dam broke, a railroad critical to the World War II effort would be flooded. So it rebuilt the dam and completed the first part of the Gooseberry Project — enlarging Scofield Reservoir. Once the Gooseberry Project was segmented into two pieces, "Carbon County was happy," said Richard Noble, project engineer for the Narrows Project for the past 15 years. "It had this big reservoir all to itself." And because completion of the project would reduce the water flow into Scofield, Carbon began fighting the project, he said.

Nobel contended that because the full Gooseberry Project was never completed, more water is flowing into Scofield than the reservoir can hold. So more than 9,000 acre feet per year are spilled downstream, ultimately flowing into the Colorado River and Gulf of Mexico.