Chris Eddington lives in a peaceful, modest bungalow at the end of a small dirt road in Tooele County. Three horses roam his half-acre property less than a mile from Great Salt Lake. Wearing a pair of cowboy boots, a plaid jacket and blue Levi jeans, Eddington said he’s frustrated with a recently approved inland port that’s on the other side of his horse stable.

“If they’re gonna put manufacturing in, I got to worry about pollution,” he said. “I got to worry about groundwater pollution because I’m on a well … all of this stuff has to do with my way of life, my property value. Who's gonna want to buy a house with a factory behind it?”

Tooele County resident Chris Eddington, whose backyard borders the recently approved Tooele Valley inland port project, poses for a photo in his house on February 27, 2024. (Photo credit: Xiangyao “Axe” Tang)

Eddington, like many in Tooele County, said he feels county officials and developers communicated poorly over the last year and ignored concerns during the approval process for the development of two inland port projects in the county.

Teri Durfee, a lifetime Tooele County resident, said she has opposed the development since she saw the first iteration of one of the port developments plans four years ago.

“The thing that upsets me is that there hasn’t seemed to be a concern for what the people most affected in the community care about,” she said.

Tooele County resident Teri Durfee, who lives near the recently approved Tooele Valley inland port project, posing for a photo on his property on February 27, 2024. (Photo credit: Xiangyao “Axe” Tang)

Residents, like Durfee, say they worry about the possibility of the developments worsening Tooele’s already bad water issues, damaging wetlands and increasing noise and air pollution and traffic.

Ben Hart, the director of Utah Inland Port Authority, says that community input will be an important part of the port’s direction.

“Everything that we’re doing as a whole is according to local ordinance and anything that will require public transparency, we’ll allow the public to be involved,” said Hart. “And so I think that the ability to still help shape a good development that is very friendly to the neighborhood is not only possible but very vital.”

‘A losing battle’

At a December meeting, the Utah Inland Port Authority board unanimously approved both the Tooele Valley Port Project – to be located about half an hour from the county seat and near Eddington’s house – and the Twenty Wells Port Project in northern Tooele County.

Nearly 30 people packed into the meeting room to share their opposition to the project. Among them was Durfee, who lives a few miles from Eddington, and other residents who expressed frustration the projects seem “all but decided” and have been since at least October 2023.

“My big concerns are the big growth we have here, the traffic and … [the] wetlands, that scares me because we’re losing [Great Salt] Lake,” Durfee told the board during the meeting, held on an early Tuesday morning.

Meeting leaders allowed four public comments, which added to the frustrations. Stop the Polluting Port, an advocacy group, held a conference directly afterward with residents to share details about their opposition to the project.

“It doesn't matter what we say, what we want – they're going to do whatever the heck they want to do,” said Mike Croley, a resident who has lived near the proposed Tooele Valley port area for 22 years. "I'll fight it until the end, but I think it's a losing battle."

Looking for positives

Developers of both projects and city and county officials have argued the ports will create quality jobs in the community, including working freight and stock for the Twenty Wells project. For the Tooele Valley Port Project, clean air manufacturing and data center technician jobs are expected based on companies who have approached them, said Charles Akerlow, managing director for Zenith Development and the Tooele Valley project lead.

“One company is a manufacturer of electric vehicles. Another would build small 500-square-foot homes for use in low-income housing sites,” Akerlow said. “We have had several who will provide i-cloud services through data storage centers which employ highly skilled technical people.”

They haven’t yet been approached by companies that are trans-loading facilities, but he said the site is “well-suited” for that.

Some residents, however, said that's not much of a positive.

“They're not jobs that you could sustain a family and live off of,” said Kyle Mathews, who lives near the Twenty Wells project.

The median pay for freight and stock jobs in Utah is $35,400 a year, according to the state’s Department of Workforce Services. The median sales price of a home in Tooele County as of February 2024 is nearly $463,000, according to the Tooele County Association of Realtors.

Tooele County resident Kyle Mathews, who lives near the recently approved Twenty Wells inland port project, posing for a photo on his property on February 27, 2024. (Photo credit: Xiangyao “Axe” Tang)

Akerlow said it’s too early to say how many jobs the Tooele Valley development will create, but estimated the “current property size could generate as many as 1,500 jobs.”

Mathews, who opposes both of the developments, said he worries the projects will lead to industrial sprawl across the area. People, he said, don’t want to live in a “concrete jungle of warehouses.”

“Who wants that in their backyard?” Mathews said. “We're not an industrial community. We're not even really a suburb community – we’re a rural community.”

Bryson Anderson, one of Eddington’s neighbors, said people settle in the area to get away from noise in the city, railroads and traffic.

“[This project] kind of defeats the purpose of coming out here,” Anderson said. “It’s a neighborhood street, and it’s not going to be a neighborhood street anymore.”

A fight since 2018

The Utah Inland Port Authority has argued their inland port project sites, planned for across the state, will help Utah’s environment and economy because they support more rail infrastructure. But, the project has faced backlash since it was first created in 2018, which led to protests shuttering board meetings and ending in arrests.

Opponents of the ports have argued the projects will have a negative impact beyond neighborhood changes, including further threatening air and water quality across the Wasatch Front.

In a 2023 report, Stop the Polluting Port and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment said the ports are the biggest threat to Great Salt Lake’s wetlands, which are important to preserve in order to save the shrinking lake.

Deeda Seed, who volunteers with Stop the Polluting Port, said the coalition is already looking into taking legal action related to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act as part of the actions around Tooele’s port projects.

“There might be litigation hooks for us, and we're looking for those because that is one way that is one way to stop the harm,” Seed said.

A Human Impact

Tooele County, in general, has more unique water issues since they are not a part of a water district and their wells, which much of Tooele Valley homes rely on, have already started to run dry, according to the 2023 report.

Jonny Vasic, executive director of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said his concerns about the Utah inland port projects stem from the small number of environmental assessments, human health risk assessments and west-side assessments.

An aerial photo of the recently approved Tooele Valley inland port project, which many local residents oppose, on March 15, 2024. (Photo credit: Xiangyao “Axe” Tang)

Several environmental assessments, including a wetlands mitigation study, have been completed for the Tooele Valley project, Akerlow said.

The 2023 report details that all Utah inland port developments could increase air pollution, noise and light pollution, and the use of pesticides, which could negatively impact nearby wetlands, the ecosystem and people who live close by.

The report noted that noise pollution is the second largest environmental cause of human health disorders after air pollution.

Artificial light exposure at night, which these projects will contribute to, can “negatively affect human health, increasing risks for heart disease, obesity, depression, sleep disorders, diabetes, breast cancer, childbirth complications and more,” according to Dark Sky.

Vasic said, regardless of the specifics of how bad the environmental impacts are, one thing is for sure—“there is no such thing as a clean port.”

“Any port that's ever come in increases diesel pollution by a great deal because more trucks are coming and going, increased noise pollution, … increased light pollution,” Vasic said. “All of those things have health risks associated with them.”

Building begins

The Tooele Valley port project, located near the I-80 Burmester exit and one-fourth mile south of Great Salt Lake, sits on about 250 acres. It is, however, likely to increase in size, possibly as much as double, said Akerlow.

Akerlow said the port will include “light manufacturing” warehousing but didn’t share more details. Many residents said they are frustrated it’s still unclear what exactly these warehouses will include.

“How can you guys get funding, get approval for something you haven’t fully figured out?” Eddington said.

Utility work is in the early stages, including building a new road, setting up gas and electricity and drilling a new well. Akerlow said utility work should be finished by the end of 2024.

Although the project area includes some wetlands, Akerlow said they’re not planning to build anything on them. But Seed, who is also the public lands senior campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, said there’s still “obvious harm to the ecosystem” if you build near wetlands.

“You're disrupting everything, paving it over with concrete, depleting water resources and bringing polluting trucks in and out,” she said.

According to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, the wetlands surrounding Great Salt Lake are “of international importance,” especially since some estimate over 90% of Utah’s original wetlands have been destroyed.

“Wetlands play an incredibly important role and keeping all of us healthy,” said Seed. “They filter water, they help keep our air clean, they suppress dust.”

The Twenty Wells project covers about 500 acres and builds upon the Lakeview Business Park, a warehouse complex the Romney Group plans to develop. Josh Romney, son of U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, leads the project as the group’s president.

The land doesn’t have any wetlands, according to an environmental assessment conducted by the Utah Inland Port Authority. But an abandoned rail spur that Savage Tooele Railroad plans to rebuild to connect with the Twenty Wells project goes directly through Great Salt Lake wetlands.

As residents and advocacy groups continue to fight inland port development, Seed said she can’t help but feel Tooele residents are “getting rolled over.”

“These poor people who I've gotten to know over the years are going to be the victims of a huge environmental injustice,” she said.

Correction (April 11, 2024) • This story was updated to correct the year the Utah Inland Port Authority was created and added comment from Ben Hart, the director of Utah Inland Port Authority.

Andrew Christiansen, a senior at the University of Utah, wrote this story as part of a College of Humanities journalism course in partnership with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative and Amplify Utah. The collaborative is a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake – and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.

They meet with alfalfa farmers, lobby lawmakers and talk easily about the impact of Great Salt Lake on the economy — all while thinking about what they want to do after high school.

They’re members of the Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake — teenagers from across the Salt Lake Valley focused on education, collaboration and legislation regarding the capitol city’s namesake body of water, said Liam Mountain LaMalfa, the group’s founder.

“Our greatest accomplishment … is bringing to the forefront the notion that the youth care about Great Salt Lake,” said LaMalfa, 18. “The [lake] is directly tied to our future — our future quality of life in the state.”

On April 20, LaMalfa and the group will build on that goal by hosting a “Saline Symposium and Celebration” at Salt Lake Center for Science Education. Open to all ages, the free event will include a youth-led panel discussion, teen speakers and state leaders discussing how to save the lake. Register here.

A three-pronged approach

The coalition launched in the summer of 2023, after the First Unitarian Church’s Environmental Ministry – a group of like-minded adults – started talking to the teens about how they might want to get involved in saving the lake. Lisa Mountain, LaMalfa’s mom, was part of that group.

“I very quickly thought that it would be really important to involve youth, west side residents and youth of color,” she said.

Mountain said the high school group “resoundingly” decided to lobby the legislature. After taking several field trips to the lake and being featured in a July 2023 PBS Utah episode of “Utah Insight,” LaMalfa decided he wanted the group open to all high-school and college-age youth in Utah.

That’s when the group became the Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake.

The coalition has a three-pronged approach, said Mountain, who acts as an adviser for the group. The teens focus on informing and educating themselves, collaborating with other advocacy groups and lobbying for legislation on Capitol Hill.

She added the group takes initiative, and in less than a year, have toured Bear River Canal Company, participated in vigils at the Capitol and met with lawmakers like Sen. Nate Blouin and leaders like Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed.

Sen. Nate Blouin talks with members of the youth coalition inside the Utah Capitol Building and during Youth Lobby Day. (Photo: Lisa Mountain)

“They inspire me constantly,” Mountain said. “They are motivated and dedicated and passionate about saving Great Salt Lake and about protecting their future in Utah and in the world.”

In early March, at one of their biweekly meetings at First Unitarian Church near the University of Utah’s campus, five of the group’s 15 members shared what the coalition means to them and why they believe saving Great Salt Lake is important.

‘Dirt and crud’

India Elliott, a senior at Granger High School, said she joined the group because she’s always been interested in activism and is concerned about the shrinking lake’s future and its long-term environmental impact. She wants, she said, to be able to grow old in her home state.

“I noticed every winter, and even in the summer, when the air quality gets really bad, and I can barely see the mountains,” she said. “I'm literally looking through dirt and crud … and it makes me feel emotionally worse.”

Great Salt Lake generates around 15 dust events a year, according to reporting by The Salt Lake Tribune. Spring and summer are becoming more unhealthy, and dust from the exposed lakebed could carry arsenic, copper and mercury.

Cloud Garcia-Ruiz, a senior at Salt Lake Center for Science Education, said they’ve always felt a deep connection to the environment, which led them to join the coalition.

“When I heard that the Great Salt Lake was in trouble, I thought, ‘Maybe this is like a chance to finally do something about it,’” Garcia-Ruiz said.

One of their favorite activities was a tree-planting event, they said, because restoring a part of nature that used to be there felt nice. The event last October with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation allowed the teens to work with the tribe’s mission of stewardship of the land and environment, Mountain said.

For Elliott, attending the vigils for the lake – which took place every morning for all 45 days of this year’s legislative session – stood out as a highlight. Community members interested in saving Great Salt Lake gathered on the steps of Capitol Hill every day. Members from the youth coalition joined every Tuesday at 8 a.m., alongside Nan Seymour, a local poet who has spent the last three legislative sessions holding some sort of vigil for the lake.

“We sing, we dance,” Elliott said. “It's light-hearted when you're kind of, like, surrounded in doom and gloom.”

‘A cultural shift’

Great Salt Lake generates nearly $2 billion for Utah’s economy annually, according to the state’s website. It contributes 5 to 10% to the lake effect snow, creating $1.2 billion for the ski industry.

“We're looking at a serious economic downturn, which is a scary thought to think about the workforce being impacted by losing billions upon billions of dollars in economic growth — gone,” LaMalfa said.

Part of the coalition’s approach is educating others and informing themselves of the science behind Great Salt Lake. Soon after the coalition’s founding, the group toured the Bear River Canal Company, which oversees 126 miles of the Bear River, Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary.

Mountain said they’ve also met with alfalfa farmers and other stakeholders, like Commissioner Steed, to get a variety of perspectives on the issue of the lake. Steed discussed with the group what youth could do to help save the lake, which includes a cultural shift, LaMalfa said.

“To really understand his perspective and cement the notion of cultural change is the thing we need,” he said.

Elliott made a slideshow about saving the lake to educate classmates and friends and to present at events. In it, she argued shifting the culture means changing how people think about using water and made suggestions like removing non-functional turf grass, installing water-wise landscaping and metering water use.

Izzy Khachatryan, a junior at Skyline High School, said she knew she wanted to get other youth involved in the issue of Great Salt Lake.

“Culture drives policy, and we need policy changes in order to get water back to the lake,” Khachatryan said. “In order to do that, we obviously need people to be aware of the issues and be committed to the issues and that starts with advocacy, which is what one of our groups' main focus is.”

Living with the consequences

While Utah lawmakers dubbed 2022 “the year of water,” the most recent legislative session did not deliver the same vigor around issues related to the lake. The number of bills passed was deemed “average” by experts who said lawmakers made enough “technical changes” like measuring, tracking and saving water to keep water policy moving in the right direction.

During the session, members of the youth coalition met with lawmakers – including Blouin, a Democrat representing the South Salt Lake City neighborhood – to discuss how they could be most impactful. Blouin, who has been working with the group since last summer, said engaging with the teens has been great.

“The legislators are not particularly representative of the population as a whole, definitely from an age perspective,” Blouin said. “Giving younger folks an opportunity to get up there and to feel like their voices are being heard even when it can be challenging … that’s important.”

Elliott said it was rewarding to experience lobby day on the hill — asking people to support bills or thanking them for their support.

“It was very empowering to talk to the important people and be heard,” Elliott said.

Utah is a young state, with the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing a median age of 31.3 years with the country’s highest share of people under 18 at 29%.

“These are … young people who are going to have to live with the consequences of the actions that we take as legislators and the decisions we make as a state,” Blouin said.

Students will join other state leaders and lawmakers – including Steed, Rep. Angela Romero and Sen. Luz Escamilla, both Democrats from Salt Lake City – at the event on April 20 as part of a panel discussion about the lake.

As for the future of the coalition, LaMalfa said he would like to bring chapters to high schools and the University of Utah. The group, he said, has made it clear Great Salt Lake is their future.

“The more I talk to people, the more people seem to have a little bit of an understanding of Great Salt Lake,” he said. “That understanding seems to be getting steadily larger … [and] when every person in the state really knows about Great Salt Lake, it'll be impossible to do anything but save her.”

Vanessa Hudson, a student at the University of Utah, wrote this story as part of a College of Humanities journalism course in partnership with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative and Amplify Utah. The collaborative is a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake – and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.

Vicky Wason eats meals with her neighbors in a common house and takes her turn doing community chores. Her children grew up playing with friends in the commons. She's never bought a lawnmower because she can always borrow someone else's.

Wason, who teaches linguistics at the University of Utah, is one of 50 people living in a tight-knit community on the west side of Salt Lake City. While they use the same spaces and things, Wason said residents of the Wasatch Commons cohousing community in Glendale also share values like cooperation, diversity, accessibility, affordability and sustainability. They’ve made it their goal, Wason said, to prioritize eco-friendly practices in their everyday lives, which they said could help places like the Great Salt Lake.

“We like living simply, and this place has allowed us to do that,” said Wason. “That's part of our values – not consuming too much.”

‘Community shares everything’

Established in 1998, Wasatch Commons is made up of 26 clustered townhouses sharing amenities. The first and only cohousing community in Utah, the founders dreamed of a place where families shared values and companionship, said Wason, who served two years in the Peace Corps before becoming one of Wasatch Commons’ first residents.

“All the things that normal Americans buy, we didn't have to,” said Wason. “I've never bought a shovel or a lawnmower – this community shares everything.”

According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, there are currently over 165 cohousing communities in the United States and another 140 in the planning process. Co-housing communities like Wasatch Commons started in Denmark in the late 1960s and spread across the country.

“We’ve created a community here on the west side, and I know my neighbors really well, they’re down-to-earth people,” said Wason.

Wasatch Commons residents, who live in a cluster of 26 townhomes, say they share everything from lawnmowers to shared values of environmental sustainability. (Photo courtesy Vicky Wason)

The members of Wasatch Commons said they crave community. Every aspect is orchestrated to foster interaction. Residents share garages, outdoor equipment and yards, Wason said. When walking through the commons, visitors will see children playing inside the shared common house or the adults cooking breakfast together. Meticulously planted flowers and plants adorn the pathway through the neighborhood, a testament to efforts made to beautify their community.

“The children always wanted to play with each other in our community,” said Wason, recalling raising her own kids at Wasatch. “They had a lot of loving people to watch out for them. They got a lot of smiles, hugs and support. People loved on them for their whole life.”

It’s not uncommon to see parties and potlucks with all the neighbors in attendance. Every week, one resident, Wason said, hosts a Saturday cafe and turns on an “open” sign above her kitchen window to announce it’s time to eat. It started, Wason said, when the woman’s husband died suddenly.

“She needed a reason to get up every day,” said Wason. “During the week, she's preparing, cooking, and gathering ingredients, thinking about what she's going to make. That keeps her busy Monday through Friday, and then she hosts cafe Saturdays.”

‘The best we can’

Residents aren’t just bonded by their shared space, they also have a sense of shared responsibility towards the environment around them, including Great Salt Lake. Wood from a railroad line that crossed the lake was reused at Wasatch Commons for beams on porches and inside the common house dining room.

Gerome Bosteels-Tcaciuc and Vicky Wason gather nearly every Saturday with other residents of Wasatch Commons for brunch. (Photo: Tess White)

Just 17 miles east of Great Salt Lake State Park, Wasatch Commons residents, like Gerome Bosteels-Tcaciuc, said the attention the ecological crisis at the lake has received in recent years creates a sense of hope.

“We are trying to save the lake,” said Bosteels-Tcaciuc, who works for Great Salt Lake Artemia, a brine shrimp harvesting company, “but there's a lot of work that needs to be done.”

Like his son, Thomas Bosteels collects brine shrimp cysts, which are harvested as food for commercially grown fish and shrimp. He moved in at Wasatch Commons two years ago, he said, but has been working at Great Salt Lake far longer.

“I’ve been working with this lake since 1985,” said Bosteels, 60. “It means a living, you know, but I think there's an emotional connection there …It’s just beautiful when you are out there in the winter, and you wake up in the morning and see those sunrises and sunsets.”

Bosteels-Tcaciuc, like his father, said the lake is more than a body of water – it’s deeply connected to who he’s become.

“My favorite, favorite memory of the lake,” he said, “is when we went to the lake with my dad and harvested the brine shrimp together.”

While replenishing the lake to ideal levels will require households, lawmakers, industry and farmers to make significant changes, even small adjustments to lower water waste can help to preserve Utah’s environment, according to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

With sustainability as one of their core values, residents of Wasatch Commons said they have made it their goal to live as simply as possible, prioritizing eco-friendly practices in their everyday lives.

To help preserve water, for example, residents xeriscape, use drip irrigation and collect rainwater. They know they are only one small community, Wason said, yet they are doing what they can to make a change.

“We’re not perfect, and we don't shame each other,” Wason said. “We’re human beings doing the best we can to meet up to our values.”

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Tess White, a student at the University of Utah, wrote this story as part of a College of Humanities journalism course in partnership with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative and Amplify Utah. The collaborative is a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake – and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.