Water Quality Stewardship Plan - Background
In the 1970's, Salt Lake County developed an Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan with the assistance of federal monies. Following Clean Water Act Section 208 guidelines, the plan was required to propose implementable solutions to area-wide water quality and pollution problems, both from point and non-point sources. Since the late-1970's, Salt Lake County has worked collaboratively with local government and non-profit organizations to monitor, protect, and restore water quality throughout the County. The original Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan has been the primary guide in these efforts.
In August of 2005, South Valley Sewer District (SVSD) made a request to amend the Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan. In the process of re-visiting the 1978 plan, it became apparent that numerous factors such as land-use, population projections, jurisdictional boundaries, water quality requirements/impairments, water supply/use, and wastewater treatment processes have changed significantly since 1978. As a result, the Salt Lake County Council allocated $240,000 into the 2006 budget to initiate the development of a Water Quality Stewardship Plan (WaQSP), which will update the existing Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan. This WaQSP will contain all of the essential elements found in the original Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan and will incorporate guidance from the recently published Handbook for Developing Watershed Plans to Restore and Protect Our Waters (EPA, 2006).
The WaQSP will instigate a holistic approach, incorporating riparian health, aquatic habitat, in-stream water quality, and public outreach in order to assure the ecological health of Salt Lake County's waterways in the future.
The WaQSP will also identify appropriate funding mechanisms to assure that action items contained in the WaQSP will be implemented and that the plan itself will be updated on a five (5) to six (6) year basis. The update of the Area-Wide Water Quality Management Plan will allow Salt Lake County to accommodate the rapidly changing characteristics of Utah's most densely populated urban area in a sustainable manner and assure the health of local waterways in the future.
History synopsis
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