CEDAR CITY — Two local officials joined the Conservative Climate Forum at Southern Utah University to talk climate impacts on business, water and policy last Tuesday.
Cedar City Councilmember Tyler Melling and Paul Monroe, the general manager at the Central Iron County Water Conservancy District joined two other panelists to discuss climate change in the Sharwin Smith Student Center’s Church Auditorium.
Melling said part of his interest in the forum is that the city needs to consider the impacts that weather and climate have on infrastructure.
“Just recently, we had to make some adjustments in our stormwater policies to accommodate for more intense, shorter-duration storms, rather than gentler, longer-duration storms,” he said. “That has different infrastructure needs and as the weather patterns change, we do have to look at that.”
The Utah Republican Party platform states that the “power to tax is also the power to control,” Melling said. The party believes that the best way to control government is to strictly control taxes “imposed on the people.” The city avoids taxing residents by making “water-wasters pay for their waste” through user fees.
Answering a student’s question about preparing for the future, Melling said the city made “significant policy changes” in how it approaches stormwater and water usage, which will have a ripple effect on other decisions, like how roads are built or how to incentivize rain gardens that will reduce urban heating with greenery while using less water.
Looking forward, Melling said that what makes Utah a desirable place to live may become less so due to changing policies or weather patterns, which could impact tax rates and housing and economic policies.
“For about the last 50 years, it’s been more and more attractive to live in this part of the country than others,” he said. “If that trend reverses, due to those weather patterns, due to more frequent flooding events, bailing muddy water out of your basement, and becomes a fact of life in this area of the country, then that’s going to have ripple effects everywhere.”
An attendee asked how climate change solutions can be “a win” for both businesses and the environment. Melling said that, having worked with the Cedar City Area Chamber of Commerce, he understood climate change to be “pretty far down on the list” and that more businesses struggle with government “red tape.”
Business values predictability, he said, and climate change could become a bigger issue as weather patterns become more erratic.
Panelist Dr. Jacqualine Grant, an associate professor in SUU’s Geosciences Department, added that while climate change discussions often focus on how solutions could hurt businesses, people could also view it from a perspective of how to take advantage of climate effects to create job opportunities.
“(It’s) a different way to think about that question that puts a little bit more positive spin on it and makes us think about how we can grow the economy and incorporate climate change solutions at the same time,” she said.
Monroe said that Iron and Beaver counties have a “significant amount” of renewable energy sources and that the wind, solar and geothermal power being produced has allowed Utah to become a “large exporter” of renewables.
Water
The Central Iron County Water Conservancy District is an organization tasked with looking 50 years into the future to ensure enough water will be available, Monroe said.
He was asked by an audience member to compare water scarcity under the status quo versus changing current policies.
It is important to obtain “resilient water resources,” Monroe said, which will involve being creative and diversifying the region’s water portfolio.
The Cedar Valley primarily receives water from melted snow, but over the last 20 years, the amount of snow has decreased. Instead, most moisture in Southern Utah is received later in the year in “monsoon-form.”
“That has caused some issues with some of the infrastructure that was mentioned, but it also has a big impact on our water source and supply,” he said.
Because the watershed from Cedar Breaks is often debris-filled and contaminated with salts, it needs to go through a settling basin before it can be utilized, Monroe said.
New infrastructure is being built to capture cleaner tailwaters in areas where the aquifer can be recharged, Monroe said. Additionally, the district is focused on completing the Pine Valley Water Project, where water will be imported from the northwest.
“And the science behind that valley is most of the recharge or water that makes it back down into the aquifer there comes from summer monsoonal storms,” he said. “And so that’s a big focus for us again, to be able to be resilient and looking into the future.”
For more information from the Conservative Climate Forum panel, read Part 1 here. To learn more about the Central Iron County Water Conservancy District, click here.
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