Greg Bunce: Welcome to another episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we’re from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center. This podcast will be bringing you Geospatial news from across Utah.
This episode is part two of a three-part series on water here in Utah. In part one we focus on water resources, in part two water rights, and in part three we talk about drinking water. You can find all of our episodes in our podcast feed or wherever you find your podcasts.
Again, today’s show is part two in the water series and we’re talking with Lee Eschler from DNR’s Division of Water Rights. Lee tells us how the PLSS section corners are a critical piece to water rights in Utah, including the locating, purchasing, and selling of these rights. He also explains the current rights situation for water in and around the Great Salt Lake and how there are no new water rights being granted on water that flows into the lake. And then we discuss a bit on adjudication and how it gives the state a better understanding of what is and what is not being used and how this is an ongoing process. So sit back, take a moment and enjoy the show.
Matt Peters: Welcome to the UGRC podcast again. Today we have Aaron Austin, and Aaron is with the Division of Water Resources within Natural Resources, the Department of Natural Resources. And there’s seven divisions there and Aaron’s division is one of those. And I must admit Aaron, for many years, I remember you and I remember another colleague Barbara Perry who since long retired, and I was always kind of intrigued by what you guys did. And then I’ve seen you over the years and then you do the lunches at the City Creek Mall. And then also I noticed that big fat chunk of change your whole organization received for House Bill 429. So I’m glad we finally can sit and chat for a little bit now. And maybe just as a start, kind of tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of, I guess for me the first thing I knew you for was Water Related Land Use. And I know that you guys do more than that, but maybe you can just kind of introduce yourself and start us off about what your office does.
Matt Peters: Good day everyone. This is Matt Peters with UGRC and once again, we’re on our podcast. Today we have Greg Bunce of course, my sidekick, and we have Lee Eschler from the Division of Water Rights, which is part of the Department of Natural Resources.
And I don’t know if a lot of you are like me, but you’re driving down the freeway and you see some big sign and it says “Land for Sale, Water Rights Included” or “Water Rights Not Included” or “Available”. For me just back in that day I would always just go water rights, I guess you have access to water, but I never really understood it. And then with Utah now in some giant drought and has been for some time, I thought you know what, we should understand a little bit more about water rights and what the Division of Water Rights does.
It was a million years ago Lee, I think it was back in the mid-90s we first met and you were working at Heritage and Arts with the State Historic Preservation Office doing archaeology work. And then I’ve just kind of watched you grow up into a young child and into a young man and now you’re at Water Rights. And so at a high level, what exactly does Water Rights have responsibility over and why?
Lee Eschler: So Water Rights is responsible for quantity of water that’s taken. We administer the appropriation distribution of the state’s water resources. Anytime you divert water from its natural flow, you would need to obtain a water right. The history behind it is it started with the pioneers as people would come and they’d want irrigation water, they would have to they would use it at that point, but then as it became part of the state, it was kind of first in time first in right. So right now if say you had a senior water right, you would be allowed to use all of your water before the next junior right. The water is deemed public property and so we’re the division that regulates that.
Greg Bunce: So Lee, this is Greg. I’m looking at the layer, the GIS layer, the points of diversion. So when you’re saying the water rights we’re talking about surface water, underground water, spring water, point to point, rediversion, all those flavors of water in the state.
Lee Eschler: Yeah, so anytime something is pulled out of its natural flow, then a water right is needed. When you see it in properties, like a water right can become real property.
Greg Bunce: And that’s sold separately, right? That’s something sold just like real estate.
Lee Eschler: Yes, it can. Generally when you buy real estate, you’d want to have the water right stay with it so you have the water, but it can be pulled out and sold separately.
Matt Peters: I’m just going to go out on a little bent. So Lee, when I think about that, think of a senior person having this water right, well a senior right, and just like, well how do they know how much water they can give away?
Lee Eschler: So when you apply for a water right you have to tell us where it is tied to a section corner, what’s the use, what are you going to use it for, and then how much you need. And so when you look at that water right, you can get up to that, say you need three cubic feet or an acre foot, you can get that that’s your limit on the top of that. So that’s in the application and it’s in our database.
Matt Peters: Okay and then do you guys have some formula you put together and say we can’t give away anymore?
Lee Eschler: Yes, so mostly groundwater, if we have many basins that are closed to new appropriations. So if you’re say for example you’re in a basin that’s closed, you would have to go and try and buy one off someone. Now the Governor just came out and declared no new appropriations for basically anything that feeds into the Great Salt Lake.
Greg Bunce: And I’m looking at a map that’s titled Groundwater Policy from your website and it looks like almost all of Central Utah or the I-15 corridor here is closed, the groundwater.
Lee Eschler: Yeah, pretty much everything is closed. Especially now with the Governor’s request or edict to say it’s everything. So that’s what we’re just getting everything ready, we’re posting the policy, and I mean really everything that flows into the Great Salt Lake is now no new appropriation. So if you want water rights in that area, you’re going to probably have to go buy them from someone.
Greg Bunce: When did these appropriations begin? Is there a certain point in time when they said, “This is how much water is available for folks to apply for?” And then at that point, is that a point in time, like a time stamp back at a certain date? And also in the same thought, does the lake ever was the lake ever factored into that? So they said, “Okay, well we need to leave this much for the lake.”
Lee Eschler: So there is a point in time you have a water right, you have a priority date set to your water right. And I’m not sure when the first water rights were, but it was in the late 1800s. And you can get you can withdraw water from the lake. For example people who would use water, you could use it as a reuse. So people who would be drying the salt, right, would need to pull it in and then they could reuse it so it wouldn’t need you wouldn’t need near the quantity. But yeah everything once it’s outside of natural diversion would require that water right.
Greg Bunce: Right. And are those the amount of water that’s considered in the system, does that ever get relooked at because of such as a drought or maybe there’s more water this year?
Lee Eschler: Yeah, so we have on our webpage we have a place where we use groundwater models and all the time like right now we’re working in Pavant creating a groundwater policy. A couple years ago we finished a groundwater policy for Beryl Enterprise. And that’s just the engineer’s job to go there and set everything up and say this is the water that we see in the groundwater and so this is what we need to do. But all the time, especially now with the drought, right, we’re putting a lot of emphasis out in the well in the Colorado.
Greg Bunce: So this is continually being updated more or less. The amount of water that’s considered to be in the system is not a stagnant thing. Like it’s continually you folks are continually looking at it and saying, “Well now there’s this much water. There used to be that much, but now there’s this much to go around.”
Lee Eschler: Yeah, so we’re evaluating. Mostly what it comes from is problems. Say like Beryl Enterprise, people will come up and say, “Hey, something’s happening here. Can you do a groundwater policy?” So we yeah we’ll go and do that.
Greg Bunce: Okay. That makes sense. And then again does is the lake, when you look at all the water, and I guess I’m specifically talking about water that flows into the Great Salt Lake since that’s a kind of a hot topic right now, does the lake get a water right? Like or when you’re divvying up all the water rights does your agency say, “Well we need to leave this much for the lake to go into the lake?”
Lee Eschler: No, in the past it’s not, but now everyone’s looking at it right now. And that’s the reason for the Governor’s request.
Matt Peters: This is quite fascinating. And just to check in on when you mention Beryl Enterprises, you mean Beryl like down south Beryl?
Lee Eschler: Yeah. Yeah down what out west of Cedar City.
Matt Peters: Yes. Yeah in Iron County. Yeah.
Lee Eschler: Because we also have we have many distribution systems. They’re mostly surface distribution and we have gauges on those that they report in real time, some most will report in real time. And then we have distribution engineers that’ll monitor those and keep everything up to date so that they can monitor the water and not run into overuse.
Matt Peters: So Lee, you’ve been at Water Rights for some time. What is kind of your primary job there at Water Rights?
Lee Eschler: So my major responsibility is creating all the feature classes that that we use. For example the Points of Diversion. We have a Microsoft SQL database and I generate those Points of Diversions each night in a Python script to create the feature class, the hosted feature layer that’s on the Open SGID.
Just before the turn of the century, one of the regional or assistant state engineers developed this database, SQL database, but what was nice he used it so that we would use our browser to enter it. So it’s it’s just blossomed from there. You you can go look at our database through the browsers. Our staff works through the browser. Right now we have close we’re getting close to 400,000 Points of Diversion. We have to go through because those Points of Diversions have to be tied to a section corner, the nine major ones. So we take that section corner, we take that Point of Diversion, we find the section corner then calculate the offset. So we would say this point is south 100 feet, east 100 feet from the northwest corner of Section 12.
Greg Bunce: Do these sound like legal descriptions? Do they come from the county or where where does that come from?
Lee Eschler: Well that’s the that’s the law. I mean obviously it would be nice to have just be able to enter UTMs, but the laws has we have to go through to the section corner.
Greg Bunce: Okay.
Lee Eschler: It has to be a legal description. Once you so you can apply for a water right and then you have five years to what we call to proof it up or to make sure it’s proper. And in that five years when you get a proof, you’re supposed to have a engineer legal survey come out and survey that point in.
Matt Peters: So Lee, I guess to drop back, so if if I was to come and work for for Water Rights, what as a new employee what kind of skill set would I need to be able to operate to operate in your world?
Lee Eschler: As a GIS person or just as a technician for Water Rights?
Matt Peters: As a GIS person.
Lee Eschler: Okay, as a GIS person, so we have Sean Brazil and he really does a lot of the desktop support for making maps, requests. My main responsibility is to create all the feature classes. And then we also have products on we we’re really big into the Esri API. So we have a map server where our staff will digitize with it. You can bring up an image, you can rectify it. It’s really kind of nice because then you can digitize it and then we put it we keep all that in a the Microsoft SQL database. We everybody in our staff uses the map server. They all do GIS, they just don’t know it. For example, you can go through and pick a point and say show me all the water rights that are within a radius, a section, and it’ll it’ll bring those up for you.
So for Sean and his responsibility, it would mostly be the the Esri world, the the desktop. He does our our supervisors think that we can program and so we we have to learn some ASP. We’re kind of switching we’re trying to switch our web applications over to Python. That’s we’re in the process right now. Mine would be more programming, more scripting. And just being able to script, be able to do SQL queries, pull data out and create it.
We have for example we have Stream Alteration so that if anytime anytime you need to change the natural course of a stream you need to apply for a permit. We also have Dam Safety where we have each night we go through and create where the dams are that we monitor. And we have a we also have a script that I’m over where if you have an area, say like I I want to draw a polygon around my home and let me know if there’s any new applications, then you fill you draw that polygon, give us your email, and then if a new application comes we send you an email. And you can do that by county, by drawing, by HUC boundary, just whatever you want to do.
Matt Peters: Okay. So it sounding like if I want to work for you guys I need to have good Python skills, I need to have ArcGIS skills, and I need to be able to do some SQL queries.
Lee Eschler: Yes.
Matt Peters: Yeah.
Greg Bunce: And you mentioned dams. Do you does your office look at all of the dams in the entire state?
Lee Eschler: Um no we the the Bureau of Reclamation has all their dams and we don’t we don’t take care of them. We take care of the high risk the high risk and the medium risk dams that they are inspected on a regular basis. The we have a Dam Safety Section that’s responsible for that. We did do a project with the old AGRC years ago where there was an inundation map created with the the flow lines that the speed that they would come out. And so that’s that information was done and then it’s posted on the Open SGID.
Greg Bunce: Yeah I wanted to mention that as well. So so speaking of the Open SGID, five six years ago the process was for aggregating data at the state level was to reach out to the agencies then they’d send us a file geodatabase or a shapefile and then we would put it together and load it. And a couple of years ago we moved into the direction of just having agencies such as yours just share through Open Data and ArcGIS Online. And just a plug in for you guys, you’ve been one of the first ones and that have been aggressive on this to actually sharing us lots of layers. And I believe you guys have shared us 14 layers as of now in the Open SGID. So so kudos to your office for for doing that.
Lee Eschler: Yeah it’s been nice for us because we’ve always had a download page where we would put everything into a zip file but now we just can send everything up to to the UGRC and it’s really nice when people say I want this and we say well here it is. And it’s hands off for us. We don’t, you know, and it’s great cause you guys are the stewards, you’re maintaining it and we don’t really need to do anything. So so it that this system is working really well.
Lee Eschler: Yes.
Greg Bunce: Well that’s I think that’s about the extent. Oh wait one other thing.
Matt Peters: Yeah I guess one thing worth mentioning mainly maybe just for Greg’s edification but back when I was very young with ArcGIS back in the 90s, a colleague of Lee’s, I believe the director was it Boyd Clayton Lee?
Lee Eschler: Yeah.
Matt Peters: Boyd was very a very bright person and did a lot of work early on. He was a very good GIS partner for AGRC at the time. We worked together a lot. The there were a lot of DNR folks were very instrumental at promoting GIS in Utah.
Lee Eschler: Yeah Boyd Boyd was had the ability to see into the future like I said. We started our own map server it was the University of Minnesota’s Open Source and we started that about 1998. And we could we could put our data up there on that and from there we progressed to Google Earth and now the Esri API but really for about the past 25 years we’ve been on the web with our data.
Greg Bunce: That’s pretty impressive actually. So really when you talk about points of diversion and stuff, this is this is a very small group of people in the state, right? Most of us are who are living in the metropolitan areas, we’re getting it through the culinary sources. How does so how does that work? Does do you folks does your office work with these the culinary sources or the cities to make sure that water is coming in that way? Yeah how how does that all fit together?
Lee Eschler: Yeah so say for example a city they would have their water rights to their wells. And then they would monitor that through us. And then they would just distribute it out. So like the best example I can think of is you would be like a stockholder in that city and you would just pay for pay your share to the city or and they would they would handle the water right. They have the right to the water right and they’re just sharing it with you.
Greg Bunce: Okay but the Division of Water Rights is still overseeing the cities as far as how much water is available. Is that correct?
Lee Eschler: Yeah. Yeah there was a bill introduced many years ago where we now go around and mon try to monitor all the cities all the drinking water facilities and they report to us each year and that’s on our webpage also.
Greg Bunce: Okay. I think you know the the last thought that I’d have is the whole adjudication process. You know we hear a lot about that and um I don’t know maybe you could speak a little bit to that and what that is.
Lee Eschler: Okay so what adjudication would do is they go out and they create a snapshot in time. So say we’re trying to work a lot in the Salt Lake Valley right now and they’re work going up on the East Bench. But that what they would do is they’d come up and say okay you you’ve had a water right is it are you still using it? Can you show it to me? And then they would just take that snapshot in time. If people are not using it or it’s an invalid water right then it would go off and then that that map or that time of adjudication uh determines if you have a water right or not. We try to get through the state but the emphasis right now is uh Northern Utah County, Salt Lake County, um and trying to get up into Wasatch County.
Greg Bunce: I see. So do you pick up a lot of so more or less this is an opportunity to see who’s not using, well one of the one of the pieces here is that you discover who’s not using their water rights and this can go back into the system so somebody else could grab that water right?
Lee Eschler: Yeah so we look and say okay this is valid you haven’t used or you haven’t used it or yeah you still have it. Um I mean obviously where you get into a situation where land has has gone from agricultural to urban then most of the time those water rights are not being used unless whoever sold them sold the water rights with them. So it’s just kind of basically is keeping an ongoing cleanup session of all the water rights.
Greg Bunce: So this is probably a never ending process right? As soon as you complete the state it’s almost you would start again.
Lee Eschler: Yeah they kind of use that as a state but yeah it’s like um we are on the East Side of Salt Lake we still would have majority of the West Side. Yeah it’s yeah you’re right it’s a never ending process.
Greg Bunce: Yeah. And and it also from my understanding reading some stuff on the website, you have to use you have to be actively using your rights in order to retain them. You can’t just say I want I want to hold onto I didn’t use them last year or the past couple years but I still want them. That doesn’t work.
Lee Eschler: Yeah there there will several you can apply for a non-use for so many years but yeah you do have to prove when they come through that you’re using it to beneficial use and where you said you were using it. The place of use has to has to match up.
Greg Bunce: Well, I mean we kind of talked about the USGS. I was going to ask you a little bit about that how you work with the USGS with the stream gauges and such. Um you mentioned it a little bit. Do you want to add anything else about the your workings with the USGS or UGS?
Lee Eschler: Yeah just the stream gauges. We they have theirs that they keep up but we we have ours that we’re doing. Um we try and send out a a program to go read them uh through cellular phones and try and get that data back then we put it in our database so you can go to our web page and see the flows. We also have another program that was written in Python that you can you can pick a stream and the gauges you can say hey if it goes below this or above that send me an email or send me a warning. So yeah we’re trying to keep everybody give them the ability to be up to date and get warnings if something’s not where they want it to be.
Greg Bunce: Right. I think my last question would be uh what what keeps your office busy these days especially as far as like GIS work? Primarily what what is the stuff that like keeps you guys going?
Lee Eschler: So right now it’s the Colorado. Uh we’re creating a uh stream network where you where we’re able to track the flows. Uh this will all be a web application and just the adjudication and keeping that up to date. Uh making sure all our feature classes are current and up to date. Which you guys do a great job of it seems like uh the services that you share with us are continually getting updates.
Lee Eschler: Yeah so like most of those we I build each night from the database. I have a script that builds them and then publishes them to AGOL and then they’re there so every morning that should be the the last night’s data.
Greg Bunce: Yeah this stuff seems like it never you know it’s there’s there’s something always continually changing in the water system in Utah whether it’s transferring of rights or different levels of water that’s available now or not available so it does seem like a a continually changing operation so that makes sense to me. Um Matt I don’t I don’t have anything else those are were the thoughts that I had. Do you have anything?
Matt Peters: No I think we’re we’re about there. You know I think that just to to mention of course that we did speak with Aaron Austin on our last uh podcast and he is with Water Resources which is also part of DNR. So just to say there is a relationship between Water Rights and Water Resources in that sense. But nope I think we’ve we’ve got it. Lee do you have anything more for us?
Lee Eschler: No just got to remember that I’m older than Matt. I’m 59.
Greg Bunce: Oh we’re doing ages now. We’re throwing them out there.
Lee Eschler: Yeah well I was a late bloomer.
Matt Peters: Yep yep.
Matt Peters: Well Lee thanks thanks a ton for being on. You know it’s been very informative and uh yeah I think it it I think these these things talking to you, talking to Aaron and others over the course of the last year or two, it it kind of helps paint a bigger picture of life here in Utah and just life uh I guess on our planet and and really how all these different things factor into quality of life and uh opportunity for Utahns. Uh it yeah it kind of helps tie the whole thing together. This this GIS is this the backbone of society and I think that these podcasts just help to bear that out. So thanks for your time.
Lee Eschler: Okay no thanks appreciate you guys hosting our hosted feature layers. It’s really nice.
Greg Bunce: Yeah you bet. Okay thanks Lee. We appreciate it.
Lee Eschler: Yep bye.
Greg Bunce: Talk to you soon.
Matt Peters: Hey.