House Passes Bishop Legislation to Deepen Willard Bay

 A bill sponsored by GOP Congressman Rob Bishop, which would increase water supplies for Northern Utah, passed the U.S. House of Representatives today. HR 839, the Arthur V. Watkins Dam Enlargement Act, authorizes the Secretary of Interior to conduct a feasibility study on increasing the height and capacity of the Watkins Dam. Raising the height of the dam would increase Willard Bay's storage capacity and provide more water for the expanding Wasatch Front population.

Willard Bay is an important water storage facility in Utah and the First District. With its 215,000 acre feet capacity, the water in Willard Bay meets the culinary and recreational needs of hundreds of thousands of residents in the Top of Utah.

"The more time passes, the more water we need in Utah," Congressman Bishop said. "Increasing our storage capacity makes sense, and it will bring benefits right now and for decades to come. Water is essential to our future in the West, and this bill ensures we'll have more of that precious resource down the road."

As the population of Northern Utah grows, the need for additional water storage capacity is acute. Because of the size of Willard Bay, raising the dam by just a few feet could dramatically increase its capacity. The exact amount of additional storage will be determined by the feasibility study, but it could be an increase of as much as 50,000 or 70,000 acre feet.

An earlier version of the bill, HR 3626 from the previous Congress, cleared the House last year, but did not come up for a final vote in the Senate. The proposal was reintroduced in both chambers in February of this year, with Senator Hatch as the lead sponsor of the Senate version. That bill, S 512, has been referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

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