The Water Wars: Utah Lake, Strawberry, the Central Utah Project, and Who Owns the River

JoAnn Giordano Editor-in-Chief, Provo.com How we make Provo.com

In Utah Valley, nobody owns the river. State law says the water belongs to the public. What people fight over are water rights: the legal right to take a set amount of water from a set source, in order of who claimed it first. Over 170 years those fights have been over three things: how high Utah Lake may rise, how the Provo River is divided, and how much Colorado River water can be pulled through the Wasatch to make up the difference.

This page is the political and legal story. For the engineering of Provo's own supply, see where Provo's water comes from. For the first federal project that brought water over the mountains, see the Strawberry Valley Project, which this page does not retell.

The rule underneath every fight

Utah's water law starts with one sentence. Utah Code 73-1-1, in its current form, says:

"All waters in this state, whether above or under the ground, are hereby declared to be the property of the public, subject to all existing rights to the use thereof."

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Everything else follows from the phrase "existing rights." A right is a permission to use a quantity of water from a specific source for a specific purpose, and older rights are served before newer ones when water is short. The state's Division of Water Rights says rights "are classified as real property in the state of Utah and are bought and sold much like real estate."

In Utah Valley, the supply ran out on paper long ago. The State Engineer's policy for northern Utah Valley and the Provo River says simply: "All supplies of water are fully appropriated." Anyone who wants water for a new use generally has to buy an existing right and get the State Engineer to approve moving it. In November 2022 Governor Spencer Cox went further and suspended new appropriations of surplus water across the Great Salt Lake Basin, which takes in Utah Lake and the Provo River.

That is why, as our secondary water guide explains, a subdivision in this valley needs water shares or rights before it needs pipes, and why growth arguments here so often turn into water arguments.

Fight one: Utah Lake against Salt Lake County

The oldest water war in the valley is between two counties over one lake. In 1872 Salt Lake County farmers dammed the Jordan River near the Point of the Mountain so they could store water in Utah Lake. Utah County farmers, whose land the higher lake flooded, protested; the headgates "washed out, being helped by persons unknown," in the words of Salt Lake County court records quoted by Salt Lake City's utilities department. An 1885 arbitration led by Church President John Taylor set a maximum level, and a 1985 lawsuit settlement replaced it after the floods of 1983 and 1984.

The details are in our full history of Utah Lake. What matters for this story is what the settlement says about ownership. Under the 1985 plan, the first 125,000 acre-feet of active storage in Utah Lake is dedicated to primary storage rights held by Salt Lake City, several canal and irrigation companies, the Salt Lake County Water Conservancy District, the Central Utah Water Conservancy District and Kennecott. Utah Lake sits in Utah County, but much of its water is owned downstream.

Fight two: dividing the Provo River

Settlers began carving up the Provo River almost immediately. A 2024 Utah Valley University report on the lake's legislative history says the territorial legislature in 1853 permitted the Provo Canal and Irrigation Company to divert half the water in the Provo River to farmland, and in 1865 let counties form irrigation districts and redirect natural channels.

The fish paid first. The June Sucker Recovery program's history of the lake, Utah Lake: Legacy, describes farmers draining the Provo River to save crops in the drought of the late 1890s, the early 1930s and the 1960s, leaving thousands of dead suckers and carp in the dry channel; after the river went dry in the 1960s, the dead fish were buried in a trench.

The river's allocations were eventually fixed by a court. The State Engineer's policy for the area names the 1921 Provo River Decree as the most notable decree there, and the river is run as a state-administered distribution system with its own Provo River Commissioner.

Fight three: reaching over the mountains

When a river is fully used, the only way to get more water is to bring it from another basin. Utah Valley has done this four times.

The Heber farmers. Utah's state history office says Heber Valley farmers privately built two systems in the 1880s to move water from the upper Strawberry Valley in the Uinta Basin to Heber Valley.

Strawberry. The first federal reclamation project in Utah, begun in 1905 with first deliveries in 1915, according to the Interior Department's project timeline. Our Strawberry Valley Project page tells it, including the unsettled tribal questions.

The Provo River Project. After drought cut storage in Utah Lake from about 850,000 acre-feet in 1931 to about 20,000 in 1935, Salt Lake City, Provo and five other Utah County towns joined irrigators to sponsor a federal project, according to the Provo River Water Users Association. It brought Deer Creek Dam, a canal from the Weber River and the six-mile Duchesne Tunnel under the Uinta divide. Construction began in May 1938.

The Central Utah Project. The biggest by far, and the subject of the rest of this page.

Fight four: the Central Utah Project

Utah's share of the Colorado

The Central Utah Project, or CUP, rests on two interstate compacts. The 1922 Colorado River Compact split the river between the upper and lower basin states. The 1948 Upper Colorado River Basin Compact then gave Utah 23 percent of the upper basin's share, which the Interior Department puts at 1.73 million acre-feet of depletions.

The Colorado Basin water the CUP draws on is in eastern Utah, in the Uinta Basin. Most of Utah's people live west of the Wasatch. The CUP's purpose, in the words of the state history office, is to store and divert Colorado Basin water "through a series of diversion and storage dams, aqueducts, and tunnels to the Bonneville Basin."

Thirty years of delays

Sen. Abe Murdock introduced a bill authorizing the CUP in 1946. Congress would not act until the upper basin states divided the water, and when the larger Colorado River Storage Project came forward, its proposed Echo Park and Split Mountain dams inside Dinosaur National Monument set off a national fight. President Eisenhower signed the storage project bill on April 11, 1956, and the CUP became its largest participating project.

The local machinery followed. The Central Utah Water Conservancy District was established in March 1964 as the local sponsor. In 1965, a deferral agreement among the federal government, the Ute Indian Tribe and the district made tribal water rights available to the CUP's Bonneville Unit, according to the Interior timeline. Ground was broken for the Bonneville Unit on May 31, 1967.

Then the costs and the opponents arrived together. The state history office's account lists:

• Cost. Bonneville Unit funding was set at $302 million in 1965 dollars; by 1985 its costs exceeded $2 billion.
• Lawsuits. In 1974 the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, the Natural Resources Defense Council and others challenged the project's environmental study.
• The tribe. The Ute Indian Tribe contested water rights tied to the project and delays in its own promised water development. "We are not going to give up our water to let it flow over to the Wasatch Front," a tribal spokesman said.
• Washington. President Ford deferred budget action in 1974, and in 1978 President Carter put the CUP on his "hit list" of western water projects. The Interior timeline says it survived and kept federal funding.
• Critics at home. A Salt Lake County Attorney's report argued that CUP backers had manufactured the need and that conservation and groundwater could solve the shortage. In the mid-1980s California Rep. George Miller argued taxpayers were overpaying for Utah water.
• The vote. In 1985, voters in the conservancy district approved raising their repayment by $140 million, with 73 percent in favor.

What the Bonneville Unit built

The Bonneville Unit's job, according to the state history office, is to move 136,000 acre-feet a year from the Uinta Basin to the Wasatch Front. Its main pieces:

• A bigger Strawberry. Soldier Creek Dam, begun in July 1971 below the original Strawberry Dam, created a reservoir holding about four times the water of the old one. Water leaves it west through the 6.5-mile Syar Tunnel.
• Collection dams in the Uinta Basin. Starvation Dam, the unit's first major dam, broke ground in June 1967 and was finished in 1970; Current Creek Dam followed in 1979 and Upper Stillwater Dam in 1987.
• Jordanelle. The storage reservoir for municipal water on the Provo River, described below.
• Pipelines to the valley. The last of these are still being built.

Jordanelle, and the dikes it replaced

The original Bonneville Unit plan included diking off Provo Bay and Goshen Bay in Utah Lake to cut evaporation. The state history office says the dikes were never built, and that Jordanelle Dam, in the Heber Valley, was chosen as the alternative to the diking and to other Provo River dams.

Jordanelle had its own opponents. The state history office says critics argued the site was geologically flawed, an argument that gained weight after Idaho's Teton Dam failed in 1976, and that Park City mining interests feared it would flood parts of the Ontario Mine. The Deseret News reported at the dedication in September 1993 that the 300-foot earth and rock dam came in on time and on budget at $114 million and would hold 320,000 acre-feet, more than twice Deer Creek. State engineer Robert Morgan, speaking for the governor, told the crowd that the next job was "the equitable distribution of the water, which always sparks a heated discussion in Utah."

The reservoir covered the hamlets of Hailstone and Keetley, whose story is in our Deer Creek and Jordanelle guide.

1992: the project changes hands

By the late 1980s Utah leaders wanted the project out of federal hands. Congress passed the Central Utah Project Completion Act, signed on October 30, 1992. According to the Interior Department and the Bureau of Reclamation, it:

• Handed construction to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, headquartered in Orem, with federal oversight.
• Created the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation Commission to carry out environmental mitigation, the agency later behind the Provo River Delta restoration.
• Cut features. It eliminated the diking of Provo and Goshen bays, the draining of Benjamin Slough and a plan to carry Utah Lake water to the Mosida area, and required the main aqueduct to be a pipeline instead of open canal.
• Deauthorized the Ute Indian Unit and wrote a settlement for the tribe into the law. Interior's FAQ says the tribe receives more than $2 million a year from sales of project municipal water, and that the act ratifies a 1990 water compact quantifying the tribe's Uinta Basin water rights, "subject to re-ratification by the state of Utah and the Tribe."

The fights did not stop. The Interior timeline says the tribe formally objected in 1998 to a reworked plan for its own Uinta Basin water, and all planning on those units ended. The same year, a plan to pipe water to farms in south Utah County and Juab County, the Spanish Fork Canyon to Nephi system, was abandoned after the Strawberry Water Users Association objected. A revised plan approved in 1999 committed 101,900 acre-feet a year from Strawberry to the Wasatch Front.

The last pipes

That 101,900 acre-feet travels through the Utah Lake System, which Interior calls "the final component of the Central Utah Project." Buried pipelines run from the mouth of Diamond Fork Canyon down Spanish Fork Canyon in the US-6 right of way, then branch:

• North, a pipeline up US-89 through Mapleton, Springville and Provo into the Provo Reservoir Canal and on to the Jordan Aqueduct for north Utah County and Salt Lake County.
• Mapleton and Springville, a 5.7-mile pipeline that replaced an open ditch from the Strawberry project and also sends water down Hobble Creek to help June suckers spawn.
• South, the Spanish Fork Canyon to Santaquin pipeline along the Union Pacific right of way, under construction and expected to be done in 2027, according to the 2026 Interior budget.
• Mona, a final pipeline from Santaquin to Mona Reservoir in Juab County, mainly to keep a conservation pool for the June sucker, estimated for completion by 2035.

So a project first proposed in 1946 is not finished in 2026. (Interior's own FAQ page still says the Bonneville Unit was "scheduled for 2021.") At full demand, Interior says, the CUP delivers about 251,750 acre-feet a year, including 44,400 acre-feet set aside to keep four Uinta Basin streams flowing, and its costs have passed $2 billion, with about $1 billion more expected.

Who owns the canal?

One last dispute shows how tangled ownership gets even after the water is delivered. The Provo Reservoir Canal, long called the Murdock Canal, runs 21 miles from the mouth of Provo Canyon toward Salt Lake County. It was built by the federal Provo River Project and run by the Provo River Water Users Association.

As houses surrounded it, the association decided to bury it in a pipe. Congress passed the Provo River Project Transfer Act in 2004 to give the association title to the canal, which, its general manager later testified, helped secure state financing. The pipeline was finished with a ribbon cutting on April 5, 2013. But the Bureau of Reclamation's lawyers then concluded that the 2004 law covered only the canal "as in existence on the date of enactment," not the new pipeline, so the title had not moved. In May 2013 the association asked Congress to fix the wording.

(A 2024 UVU report on Utah Lake legislation describes the 2004 act as transferring ownership of "the Provo River and related water sources" to the state. The association's testimony and the act's description make clear it concerned the canal, not the river.)

The trail laid on top of the pipe is the Murdock Canal Trail, so the people walking and riding it are traveling over one of the valley's quieter property questions.

What this means if you live here

• Your tap water and your sprinkler water may have different owners. Cities run the culinary systems; canal and irrigation companies, many dating to the settlement era, own the secondary systems. Our secondary water guide explains shares.
• Some of your water probably crossed the Wasatch. Provo River water is supplemented from the Weber and Duchesne rivers, and CUP water arrives from Strawberry.
• The valley is out of new water. The State Engineer treats the area as fully appropriated, so savings at home are the one supply a household controls; our waterwise landscaping guide covers the local programs.
• The arguments are not over. Interior's FAQ describes the Ute compact as subject to re-ratification by the state and the tribe, the last CUP pipeline is years away, and every proposal for Utah Lake, from dikes to islands to a bridge, ends up as a question about water and who holds the rights to it.

JoAnn Giordano

Editor-in-Chief

JoAnn Giordano is the editor-in-chief of Provo.com. Having lived in and around Utah Valley for years, she leads the site's editorial direction with a focus on the comprehensive, honest local coverage that helps residents, students, and newcomers feel at home. When she's not shaping Provo.com's restaurant and neighborhood coverage, she's exploring the valley's trails and tracking down the best new spots on Center Street.

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