A Road Runs Through It
The True Impacts of Our Legacy
by Marlin Stum
The chosen route would impact 160 acres of federally protected wetlands. The chosen route must be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, which appears difficult. But let's take a look at how a highway impacts a wetland.
First off, the Great Salt Lake's wetlands are strategically located along the Pacific and Central flyways and are essential for birds migrating between Canada, the United States, Mexico and Central America. The area now is a Western Hemispheric Shorebird Reserve, an international designation designed to protect key wetlands.
About 750,000 ducks and geese hatch here each year; millions more shorebirds and waterfowl rest and feed during annual migrations. Home to more than 100 species of birds, this ecosystem also supports fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. Adjacent to the wetlands lies critical upland habitat, where birds like the long-billed curlew and white-faced ibis nest. Hawks, bald eagles, red fox and mule deer prowl for meals.
"It's an amazing part of the planet," says Chris Montague of the Nature Conservancy, one of many groups actively protecting the area.
Moving east to slightly higher ground, one finds prime agricultural land. A center of the state's orchards and vegetable farms only 30 years ago, this region now grows selfsame tract homes and roads. Not much farther east is the I-15 corridor, six congested lanes of cars, semi trucks, and exhaust fumes. Residential neighborhoods take up the remaining land east to the implacable Wasatch Range.
Besieged by asphalt fantasies and developer's dreams, landfills that once were marshes, airborne heavy metals from lakeside mineral extraction plants, and chemically-tainted streams, today's lake appears to some more a sewer than a jewel. Joel Peterson, former president of Friends of Great Salt Lake and now manager of Layton Wetlands Preserve, calls it "death by a thousand cuts."
Naturalist, Ella Sorensen, caretaker of the National Audubon Society's Gillmor Wildlife Sanctuary on the lake's south shore, echoes Peterson's sentiments. "I've watched the lake picked apart piece by piece," she says. "There is no acknowledgment of the masterpiece."
Not much more can fit into this thin strip of fertile landscape, it seems; however, the proposed Legacy West Davis Highway would slice through the middle of it all.
The Legacy Highway is the pet of Gov. Mike Leavitt, who envisions it running 120 miles from Nephi to Brigham City. Lending institutions and highway contractors will rake in the dough, while suburban sprawl grows. The Great Salt Lake ecosystem stands to suffer perhaps its final cut.
Do Utahns really crave convenience at the sacrifice of the environment? Is Legacy the result of environmental ignorance, indifference, avarice or planned power-seeking?
"We don't build roads just because we want to build roads," says Byron Parker, Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) head of the Legacy Project.
According to UDOT, increased mass transit service, telecommuting and trip reduction alone cannot satisfy traffic demand between Ogden and Salt Lake City; 38 percent of the demand will remain unmet. "This leaves roadways as the only remaining strategy for servicing the 2020 traffic projections," says UDOT engineer, Kent Hansen.
A high-capacity, limited access highway of 18 lanes--nine in each direction--is needed, says UDOT, which concedes that such a highway is unfeasible. UDOT's vision of the next two decades? Begin building a four-lane Legacy Highway this summer (the West Davis section would run from the Farmington-Lagoon exit at I-15 to North Salt Lake), finish it in four years, and expand I-15 through Davis County to 10 lanes in the spring of 2002. Traffic problems would not be solved, but existing freeway congestion might not get worse. After 2020, who knows?
Death of an Ecosystem? "We don't take a position on whether we need a freeway or not," he says of DWR. "I do know that when you put a highway project out there like the Legacy, there will be impacts on wildlife." Dalton speaks candidly of concerns like road kill, pollution, wetlands ruination and mitigation.
"I-15 does run over deer or anything else that gets out there on it," he notes. "Figuratively speaking, no animal gets on that road on one side and lives to make it to the other side. Humans have the same problem."
By UDOT's own admission, any of the route alternatives for the highway would destroy 100-200 acres of prime wetlands, depending on which route is chosen. Dalton estimates that 75 percent of Utah's wetlands are associated with the greater Great Salt Lake ecosystem, which includes the lake's tributaries.
"Wetlands in northern Utah are probably the most threatened natural resource that this state has right now," he says. "That's because we have unprecedented growth in the human population, expansion in municipal and transportation endeavors, and all of that lands on wetlands in some way or another.
"Many people look at the lake as a barren, sterile body and that's not at all true," Dalton continues. "Those brine flies and brine shrimp are in fact the cornerstone for a very long food chain.
A secondary cornerstone is the Chironomids, little midges, that are supported in the fresher water marshes that border the lake," he adds. "Those midges support an array of other birds and fishes. Some fishes are eating other fishes, and some birds are eating fishes. It's a very complex system."
Dalton also worries about runoff pollution from another highway.
Cars drip all kinds of crud--oil and gas and some lubricants that are spewing about, but their cargo as well. When I say cars, I mean everything from a VW up to those big diesels--who knows what they're carrying. The fact is that crashes occur and that stuff gets washed downstream. It ends up in the wetlands and ultimately in the Great Salt Lake."
Some wildlife may suffer more than others. DWR identified a peregrine falcon aerie at the north end of one proposed route and a bald eagle nest at the south end. Peregrines are an endangered species in Utah, and bald eagles are a threatened species.
Then there is air pollution, 50-60 percent of which along the Wasatch Front already comes from motor vehicles. More vehicles means more soot, carbon monoxide and other pollutants that can settle out in precipitation. What will the impact be on lake flora and fauna? No one is sure.
There are secondary environmental impacts too. One proposed highway alignment impinges on the Central Davis County Sewer District plant in Kaysville. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently ranked the plant among the top in the country in pollution prevention, management, safety and waste handling. Legacy construction could decrease plant efficiency and raise its operating costs. What happens to the lake if sewage treatment is compromised?
Such concerns produced the federal Clean Water Act in 1977. Operating under its strict guidelines, the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for insuring the viability of the nation's waterways. The Corps must issue a constuction permit before any wetlands are destroyed, but its legal imperative is avoiding "net loss and functions of existing wetlands," according to Michael Schwinn, project manager and chief regulatory officer with the Corps in Bountiful. Secondarily, the Corps must minimize loss. As a last resort, it requires mitigation efforts. Based on its findings, the Corps staunchly opposes the two westernmost alignments for Legacy.
Schwinn grew up in Utah and has seen firsthand the continuing degradation of the lake lands.
"Leopard frogs have pretty much disappeared along the Wasatch Front," says Schwinn. "We've lost an entire population of animals."
Pollution and habitat destruction speed the demise of amphibians, considered to be excellent indicator species mirroring the overall health of the environment. Once a food source for residents like great blue herons and least bitterns, vanished leopard frogs portend a sick lake ecosystem.
Mitigation--Does it Work? DWR and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USF&W) have brought environmentalists together to discuss wetlands impacts and mitigation, a discussion resisted by many. "They said by merely coming to the meeting it would mean they had caved in to having a highway," notes Larry Dalton.
By federal law, any wetlands destroyed must be replaced. Mitigation can take four forms: Preserving existing wetlands, enhancing those lands that exist, restoring wetlands that have been degraded (such as by loss of hydrology), or creation of new wetlands. UDOT has proffered up to a 10 to one trade ratio for mitigating wetlands destroyed by Legacy. If 200 acres of wetlands are ruined, what will it cost to create or enhance 2,000 acres of equivalent wetlands? Where will those mitigated wetlands come from? And how environmentally effective is mitigation?
"The science of creating wetlands is not very good," says Dalton, noting that, nationwide, 50 percent of those efforts fail.
Dalton sees much greater potential for preserving and enhancing existing wetlands. "It could be very effective," he says. "There is ample opportunity to conduct mitigation in an area proximal to the Legacy. It means you're going to come away with a net loss of wetlands," he admits. "None of us are very happy about that."
And what guarantees that today's mitigation wetlands won't become tomorrow's sacrifice?
"Nothing." says Dalton. "Given a hundred years, I would expect fully that would happen. The environmental community keeps saying 'save the wetlands.' And the rest of the community--the community that we all elect--says 'we need to grow and prosper.' As a human population, we need to make decisions about growth. We, in Utah, have not confronted ourselves with that. For some, it's a sin to even talk about controlling human population growth."
Ivan Weber, a Salt Lake City resident, wrote a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune opposing Legacy, which he blames partly on ignorance. "If you don't know the importance of what you propose to eradicate, you can't understand the importance of self-restraint," he wrote. His point is well made. So little basic science is known about the mysterious lake, that perhaps officials can be partially excused for not knowing what we stand to lose.
Take the bird populations sustained by the lake ecosystem, for instance. DWR and USF&W personnel--aided by volunteers--last year made a concerted effort to identify bird numbers on the lake. According to DWR biologist Joel Flory, 75 species of waterbirds were surveyed--five million individual shorebirds and waterfowl!
Flory notes that one-day bird counts often fail to show how extensive migrational use actually is. At Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area, 500 Western sandpipers were counted one day, and 26,000 in a single day the following week. By the third week, a day count revealed only 1,000 sandpipers.
DWR biologists also struggle to understand the causes and repercussions of a recent crash of the brine shrimp population after record harvests in 1995 and 1996. They know that existing railroad and highway dikes fragment the lake into sections of widely varying salinity. Apparently abundant precipitation has caused a dramatic change in lake biology. No one knows what the impact will be on the lake's complex food chain.
What Is The Real Priority? The Utah Legislature needs to eliminate some road projects or start printing its own currency.
High environmental and construction costs wiped out two initial Legacy proposals that appear ludicrous. One routed the highway across the Antelope Island causeway, down the east side of the island, and across the lake again to the south shore. That proposal would have devastated the showcase wildlife sanctuary that Antelope Island State Park has become. Another scheme had a portion of the highway crossing Farmington Bay on a causeway or bridge, a plan that would have severe consequences for the ecosystem and would probably liquefy during an earthquake.
Farmington city officials are trying to resurrect the latter plot, saying their city has been unfairly targeted as the confluence for three major highways--U.S. 89, I-15 and Legacy. Indeed, Farmington is the narrow neck of the hourglass of finite land between the lake and the mountains.
While the Corps of Engineers opposes the westernmost alignments because of wetlands destruction, some local civic leaders fear a more easterly Legacy route would ruin valuable development land. Aided by powerful Senate President Lane Beattie, who owns 13 acres near an eastern alignment, they vow to block that path. As the Legacy project appears doomed to a stalemate, UDOT planners scramble to accomodate various interests. In fact, Legacy appears to have more alternative routes to it than an alley cat in heat.
During a public Great Salt Lake Issues Forum sponsored by Friends of Great Salt Lake in February, UDOT's Kent Hansen gave a slick visual presentation on Legacy. During the show, Hansen commented, "Here you can see where we adjusted the alignment to avoid a golf course while keeping the roadway as far out of the wetlands as possible."
Meanwhile, Cindy Cody, head of the EPA office in Denver, is unconvinced that any new road is needed. Cody criticizes Utah officials for failing to produce a long-range transportation study, not identifying alternatives to the highway, and underestimating the numbers of people who would use mass transit.
Roger Borgenicht sees projects like Legacy as a dark, self-fulfilling prophecy. He chairs the Future Moves Coalition, a public interest group concerned about transportation impacts along the Wasatch Front. He notes that out of $9.7 billion planned for Utah transportation during the next 20 years, $9.2 billion is slated for roads.
"No wonder with 94 percent of the investment planned to build roads that we will become more road dependent," he chides.
"I believe that the right question we should be asking is...how can we make land use decisions and transportation investments whose specific goal is to help reduce that growth." Borgenicht's vision reaches beyond the end of his nose--to communities like Boulder, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon. In Boulder, pedestrians and cyclists are a priority form of transportation; growth and road construction are limited by law. Portland recently dumped a major beltway construction plan, shifting funds to its light rail system. About 40 percent of the people traveling into downtown Portland use mass transit, says Borgenicht.
He says that Utah persists with "dead-worm" development, illustrated by some residential areas with cul-de-sacs that can only be reached by cars, do not link with other parts of the community, and don't even have sidewalks.
"There is some reason to be optimistic about the lake these days if you ignore Legacy for a minute," says Chris Montague. "There is a slow change in public opinion and appreciation, and people are starting to realize that this is a world-class natural area in their backyards."
Although a strong proponent of the lake's "intrinsic value", Larry Dalton reminds us of a more selfish reason for preserving the lake's ecosystem. "Man's link to it is recreation," he says. Hunters and fishers use these lands, and Utah waterfowl hunters spend $5 million annually on their sport. Bird enthusiasists, mountain bikers and hikers roam here. According to a USF&W study, Utahns spend $153 million a year to watch wildlife, and nonconsumptive use predominates at Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area.
People are very dependent upon that(lake) system for recreation," Dalton says. "Take a look at your own life and imagine it without recreation."
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The fight is on. Last month the Utah Transportation Commission opted for something known as Alternative C as the recommended route for the Legacy Highway through Davis County. The route has all the conveniences of commerce but all the inconveniences run straight through and over our wildlife and their homes.
Legacy, too, would be a barrier to wildlife movement. "There is no question that birds will fly into traffic flow and get run down," he says. "Skunks, raccoons, fox and a whole cast of other little guys could get out on the road and get squeezed out--that's going to happen. But the bigger impact is the fact that the footprint of the highway is going to take out a substantial amount of wetlands."
While it was known that at least 500,000 eared grebes depend on the ecosytem for food and safety during migrations, Flory said biologists were surprised to find 1.2 million eared grebes feeding on the lake. Consuming a diet of 98 percent brine shrimp, grebes double their body mass during the late summer, gaining energy and stamina to fly to wintering grounds in South America. Additional scrutiny of the survey's aerial photographs revealed abundant dive rings--evidence of grebes actually feeding underwater. When these rings were counted, eared grebe numbers soared to 1.46 million birds!
