A companion piece to "Water, the Public Trust, and Where the Forest Service Belongs."
I posted an essay on this blog earlier this week arguing that the Forest Service’s operational center should not be moved to Salt Lake City. The argument rested on a specific claim: that the political culture of the proposed host state treats water as an allocable commodity rather than as a public trust, and that this cultural difference is incompatible with the agency’s 1897 statutory mandate to maintain favorable conditions of water flows. I named the Great Salt Lake as direct evidence of how the host state’s water tradition has played out in practice.
I did not expect the test to be administered so early. It has been.
What happened this week
On Thursday, May 21, Governor Spencer Cox issued an executive order declaring a statewide drought emergency. All twenty-nine Utah counties are in severe drought; twenty-two are in extreme drought; Uintah County is in exceptional drought. The 2025–26 winter was the warmest on record in Utah. Snowpack peaked three weeks early at the lowest level since 1930. Snowpack supplies ninety-five percent of Utah’s water. The reservoir reserves the state is now drawing on stand at seventy percent of capacity. Cox called this “one of the worst droughts in history” and noted that his own farm in Sanpete County has been cut to about half of normal production for 2026.
At the same press conference, Cox addressed plans for a forty-thousand-acre data center campus called Stratos, approved earlier this month by Box Elder County commissioners along the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. The project is backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary. According to reporting in Utah News Dispatch and the Salt Lake Tribune, Stratos is projected to consume twice as much energy as the entire state of Utah currently uses, and could increase the state’s carbon emissions by more than fifty percent. Hundreds of Utahns demonstrated against it at the Capitol on May 14 and again on May 23.
Cox’s defense, repeated on May 21, was that the data center would use less water than the agricultural operations currently on the site. That accounting may be technically correct on the input side. It does not account for the project’s energy demand, the air-quality consequences, the construction footprint, or the fact that the state is approving one of the world’s largest industrial projects next to its dying terminal lake during the worst drought in modern Utah history.
On Saturday, May 23, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin toured the Great Salt Lake at Farmington Bay. The visit was occasioned by a proposed one-billion-dollar federal allocation in the president’s budget for Great Salt Lake recovery — money for agricultural water leasing, ecosystem restoration, municipal water conservation, and habitat management. When reporters asked Zeldin about Stratos, he punted. “As far as our role with these data centers, EPA isn’t stepping all over the toes of that process,” he said. “In many cases, with states and local municipalities, the state has primacy for the air permitting.”
The pattern
I am not writing this to score a point. The original essay made that commitment explicitly and I want to keep it. But the week’s events reveal a pattern that does not come into focus from any single piece of news, and the pattern matters for the argument.
The same federal administration is doing three things at once. It is proposing a billion dollars in federal money to help recover the Great Salt Lake. It is deferring to state regulators on a forty-thousand-acre industrial project that will roughly double Utah’s energy use and may increase its carbon emissions by more than half, next to the lake the billion dollars is meant to save. And it is proposing to move the operational center of the federal agency whose 1897 statutory mandate is favorable conditions of water flows to the political environment that produced this outcome.
These three moves point in different directions. The first treats water as a public trust worthy of federal investment. The second treats water and air as state-primacy matters in which federal authority steps aside. The third places the federal water-flows agency inside the political culture that has produced the lake’s depletion in the first place. The contradictions are not abstract. They will produce real decisions about real watersheds across the National Forest System over the next decade.
This is what the original essay was warning about. Not that any single Utah politician or any single project is the problem. The problem is structural — what happens when an agency built around the public-trust tradition is placed inside a political culture that treats the trust as state-by-state discretion. The agency absorbs the assumptions of the political culture it lives inside. That is the structural risk. The Stratos project, the drought declaration on the same day, and the EPA’s deferral to state primacy three days later are evidence that the political culture in question is operating exactly as the original essay described.
What this means for the Forest Service
The original essay proposed Missoula as the defensible alternative if a move is going to happen at all. Nothing this week has changed that case. The Montana Supreme Court’s recent affirmation of the public-trust character of natural resources runs in exactly the opposite direction from the EPA’s deferral-to-state-primacy posture in Utah. The institutional density that already exists in Missoula — the Aerial Fire Depot, the Smokejumper Base, the Fire Sciences Laboratory, Region 1 headquarters, the forestry school — sits inside a political culture that treats federal lands as a public inheritance rather than as a state-managed asset class.
One additional point is worth making, and I should have made it more clearly the first time. I worked in Salt Lake City for four years at the Geospatial Technology and Applications Center. I know the city, I know the agency footprint there, and I know the people who do good work in that building. Nothing in this essay or the original is a criticism of Forest Service employees in Salt Lake City or of GTAC. The argument is about the political environment the agency would absorb if its operational center is relocated there, not about the people currently working there or about Utah as a state. The distinction matters and I want to be precise about it.
What I am not saying
I am not saying the Stratos project is going to happen exactly as proposed. The permitting process may run for years. Public opposition is real and growing. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality has not yet received an air-quality permit application. The protests at the Capitol on May 14 and May 23 show that Utahns themselves are pushing back on this project, hard, and that pushback is part of why the public-trust tradition is not dead in any state. Citizens carrying signs reading “you can’t drink data” are doing public-trust work whether they would frame it that way or not.
What I am saying is that the test the original essay proposed has been administered, and the results are visible. The political culture of the proposed host state has shown, within seven days of the essay’s publication, exactly the pattern the essay described. The drought declaration, the data center, the EPA’s deferral, and the billion-dollar lake recovery proposal all point at the same structural fact: the federal water-flows agency does not belong in a political environment where water and air are state-primacy matters and federal authority steps aside. The 1897 Organic Act is law. The test is straightforward. The proposed move fails it. Missoula passes.
A note on sources.
Drought declaration details from the Utah Governor’s Office press release of May 21, 2026, and reporting in the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah News Dispatch, and the Standard-Examiner. Stratos project details from Utah News Dispatch reporting from May 14, May 19, and May 23. EPA Administrator Zeldin’s comments at Farmington Bay from Utah News Dispatch and Salt Lake Tribune reporting of May 24. The original essay, “Water, the Public Trust, and Where the Forest Service Belongs,” is posted on this blog under the date of May 25, 2026.
Samuel Lammie is a geospatial professional (GISP) and former federal employee. His Forest Service career included four years at the Geospatial Technology and Applications Center in Salt Lake City and a capstone role as Northern Region Geospatial Program Manager in Missoula. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author’s.
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