The valley, nine times

The state pays the capital cost of converting an irrigated acre, lends the rest at three percent, and leases the freed water instream to the lake. It never names a crop.

And it builds what conversion actually needs — a chiller, a cooler, a licensed small-scale butcher, and a route with a van — co-operatively owned by the farms it serves.

⭐ A 500-acre alfalfa outfit puts 80 acres into pasture and produce, dries the other 420, and clears $107,383 a year against the $47,250 it makes now. Two and a quarter times the money on sixteen percent of the water, and the family is still on the ground. It rides on $152 million the state already appropriated and has not spent.

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Water in, water out, and your water bill. In minus out is what evaporated. If your bill already covers it at the commercial rate you owe nothing; if it does not, the difference goes to the lake.

It charges only metered users, so unmetered agricultural diversion is outside it entirely — that is deliberate and it is printed on the page. Farms are handled by Spurs, with money instead of a charge.

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A siting ordinance. Reject your heat to rock, bring water in from outside the basin, or catch your steam and return it — and pay nothing. Evaporate basin water and pay the commercial rate; evaporate treated drinking water and pay the household rate.

⭐ Every acre-foot evaporated funds ten to twenty-one acre-feet of freed farm water through the transition programme. A single 20 MW facility destroys about 256 acre-feet a year and pays for two to five thousand. It does not save the lake on its own — it guarantees data centres are not the thing that kills it.

It also puts the building below ground and leaves what happens on top to the town.

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One sentence

We already set the money aside, here is how it pays for itself, and nobody who cannot measure their water gets charged for it.

The division of labour

instrument	does	lives in
Spurs	builds the cold chain — chiller, cooler, butcher, distribution — co-operatively owned, and pays farmers to convert	73-10g amends
Dust	charges a floor on evaporative loss, metered users only	73-32 Part 4 enacts
Polished Boots	siting conditions for thermal load facilities — water priced, building conditioned	54-26 Part 10 enacts

How they interlock

Boots installs the meter. Dust reads it. Spurs spends the money. The connection between Boots and Dust is measurement; the connection between Dust and Spurs is a general appropriation, not a rebate.

⭐ That distinction is deliberate. West Lynn Creamery v. Healy (1994) struck a charge whose proceeds were returned to the class that paid it. Here the payers are metered industrial users and the recipients are unmetered farms — different groups, no rebate, no neutralisation.

Why three bills and not one

Utah Constitution Art. VI §22 — single subject. A water charge, data-centre siting conditions and an agricultural appropriation in one instrument is the shape that draws a single-subject challenge. Three separate bills is the safer architecture, and we would like that judgement checked.

The whole package, written for counsel →

The bills say what the law should be. This says who pays for it and why they would want to. The first ask is a gravity battery — five hundred feet of head, two ponds, and a hall below grade. Nothing that needs a place in a queue or a decade to clear.

⭐ Compute pays for the rest. The grid connection, the fibre, the pipeline, the greenhouse and the park are all paid for by the machines in the hall, inside two years.

And then the pipe

One station is a battery. A line of them is a corridor — and a corridor that lifts water uphill is a pipe that pays for itself on the way. You never propose a pipeline. You propose a bypass that keeps through-traffic off downtown, and the trench being dug anyway carries water, sewer, fibre and power.

⭐ Ending the megadrought is the side effect, not the pitch. Moving the water, and charging it a few degrees for whoever needed it at crop temperature anyway.

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