Water was a hot topic at the City/County meeting on Wednesday in Vernal as the Ashley Valley Water and Sewer Improvement District presented their water study findings. In March, the District announced that all new connections were suspended for 6 months as the District performed a water rights study and to determine how close to their water rights limit they were at with their already existing 14,000 customers. The results were exactly what was suspected, they do not have water to sustain growth in their boundaries and the time has come to implement a process dictated by state law on how prospective builders can extract water rights to enable the construction of their project. That process, which is common in communities throughout the state and beyond, includes future developers and builders securing water from irrigators. The concept behind this is that the piece of land that was once receiving agricultural water rights is now being retired to become a new business or home and so the water that historically went to that piece of land should now come to the same parcel, just from a different delivery method. Ashley Valley Water and Sewer Improvement District expects to be adopting a policy next month concerning this prospective process but how this will work moving forward with canal companies is anything but simple. It was emphasized during the meeting that this topic is very complicated and it will take time and effort to sort it out and see what the future holds for the distribution of water in Uintah County into the future.
