In 2018 a Utah company called Lake Restoration Solutions brought an idea to the state Legislature that sounded like science fiction. Utah Lake, shallow, warm and plagued by algae, could be fixed by digging it out. The mud scraped from the bottom would be piled into new land, and the new land would be sold to pay for everything.
The Legislature gave the idea a legal path that same year. House Bill 272, the Utah Lake Amendments, was sponsored by Rep. Mike McKell with Sen. Deidre Henderson carrying it in the Senate. It passed the House 54 to 18 on February 27, 2018, cleared the Senate on March 8 and was signed on March 21. The law told the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, which manages the lakebed for the state, to consider handing over pieces of it to a private party in exchange for a comprehensive restoration of the lake.
A city on the water
Over the next four years the plan grew into one of the boldest proposals in Utah history. The company would dredge about a billion cubic yards of sediment, deepening the lake by an average of seven feet, and raise 34 islands covering roughly 18,000 acres, down from an original 20,000. The islands would carry homes, businesses, wildlife habitat and at least four roads, and add some 190 miles of new shoreline. The price was put at $6.4 billion, to be paid with private money, and the work would take 15 years in five phases.
Vineyard was where it would begin. The first phase called for a chain of islands framing a new bay off the city's shore. The northernmost island would cover 119 acres and hold 60 lots of half an acre to 7 acres, and the company's prospectus projected land sales averaging $480,000 an acre. Jon Benson, the company's operations chief, described the whole undertaking as "one of the largest master-planned communities ever undertaken in the U.S."
Vineyard had already put its name on the project. On September 30, 2020, Mayor Julie Fullmer signed a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency supporting the company's request for a federal loan and committing $5 million from the city's redevelopment agency toward project costs. The letter was never discussed in a public city council or redevelopment agency meeting. After it surfaced, two people filed public records requests in early 2022 to learn how the letter came about, among them Vineyard resident Shawn Herring. Fullmer said the letter was support for the loan application, not a final commitment of city money, and told the Daily Herald, "Vineyard is at a wait-and-see position." In February 2022 the city council took a neutral position on the project.
The scientists object
The scientists who studied Utah Lake were not waiting. In December 2021, 117 ecologists, engineers, environmental scientists, resource managers and lawyers signed an open letter urging local, state and federal leaders to oppose the plan, 109 of them by name and eight anonymously. They argued that dredging could make the lake's water quality worse, devastate it ecologically and disrupt restoration efforts already under way. They also said the company had claimed endorsements from public agencies that did not exist. Of the agencies they contacted, they wrote, "none of which have endorsed the project."
The company answered one critic in court. On January 10, 2022, it sued Ben Abbott, a Brigham Young University ecologist who had attacked the plan on his blog, on social media and at public meetings, accusing him of defamation and seeking at least $3 million. Abbott countersued, arguing that the suit was an attempt to silence public debate. Four days before the suit, on January 6, the company had filed its permit application with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The federal review moved slowly. In March 2022 the Corps decided a full environmental impact statement was required and chose a contractor, Anchor QEA, to prepare it. By October 2022 the review was on hold; a Corps permit specialist wrote that the application was incomplete because the company had not supplied all the requested information.
You cannot privatize lands.Jamie Barnes, Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands
The Legislature, meanwhile, began building its own guardrails. In March 2022 lawmakers passed House Bill 232, sponsored by Rep. Brady Brammer of Pleasant Grove and Sen. McKell, creating the Utah Lake Authority to replace the old Utah Lake Commission and write a management plan for the whole lakebed, about 150 square miles. Its 15 member board drew from the Legislature, the governor's office, Utah County and several lakefront cities. Before passage, lawmakers stripped out language that would have let the authority dispose of lakebed. A companion bill from Rep. Keven Stratton of Orem added scrutiny to any transfer of the lake's land.
The state says no
The decisive blow came from the state's land managers. On October 27, 2022, the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands issued a 22 page decision canceling the company's application. The project would privatize roughly 16,000 acres of lakebed, the division found, and the bed of a navigable lake is sovereign land held in trust for the public. Division director Jamie Barnes put it plainly: "You cannot privatize lands." On December 12, 2022, Joel Ferry, executive director of the Department of Natural Resources, rejected the company's appeal.
Lake Restoration Solutions sued the state on January 11, 2023, in 4th District Court in Provo, arguing that the division had misread the public trust doctrine and ignored the factors the 2018 law laid out. Judge Christine Johnson threw out most of the case while letting a narrow part go forward. It never got further. On June 13, 2023, the company's president, Jon Benson, wrote to the judge in Abbott's case that the firm could not continue operations or pay its debts. It dropped its suit against Abbott and withdrew its suit against the state. "Lake Restoration Solutions, LLC no longer exists as a functioning entity," Benson said in a statement. Abbott called the news a huge victory for the lake.
What was left
The fallout reached Vineyard City Hall. In October 2023 the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Eric Ellis, who had led the Utah Lake Commission and then the new Utah Lake Authority, had written letters supporting the company's federal loan request that pledged money he did not control. Ellis stepped down from the authority that month to become Vineyard's city manager. At a council meeting, Jake Holdaway, a sixth generation lakeshore landowner whose family land had appeared in a company investor presentation with a road drawn across it, asked Fullmer to resign. Holdaway was then running for the city council.
The law that started it all did not survive much longer. In 2024 McKell, the same lawmaker who had sponsored the 2018 bill, carried Senate Bill 242 with Brammer as its House sponsor. It repealed the Utah Lake Restoration Act, the chapter of state code that had allowed lakebed to be traded for restoration, effective May 1, 2024.
The lake off Vineyard still looks the way it did in 2018: wide, shallow and open to anyone with a kayak. The islands exist only in a prospectus, and the bay that was supposed to rise first off the city's shore remains open water.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-islands-that-never-rose/
