The Checklist for Buying Water

The Checklist Itself

The Trust's evaluation framework runs on two tiers. Threshold criteria are pass/fail — a deal that fails one is out, at least in theory: clear title and ownership, evidence of legal historic use, a legal pathway to transfer the right to Great Salt Lake use, a physical pathway to actually deliver the water, proof the deal creates real net new inflow (not water that was already surplus or "stacked"), the ability to monitor the benefit once it's done, and cost-effectiveness against comparable transactions.

Desired criteria don't disqualify a deal but make it more attractive: whether it builds a partnership useful for future deals, whether the supply is reliable or long-term, whether it's repeatable at scale, how fast and cheap it is to complete, whether it leverages matching or in-kind funding, whether it fits with existing local programs, whether it benefits a priority habitat location, and whether it delivers multiple benefits — water quality, habitat, community, and recreation together.

What It Measures Well

Read on its own terms, this is a reasonably rigorous framework. Requiring clear title before spending public and philanthropic money on a water right is basic due diligence, and this project hasn't found evidence it's being skipped. Tying cost-effectiveness to "observed pricing" comparables is a normal way to guard against overpaying, even though it has a real limit worth naming plainly: if the broader market for these water rights is itself inflated, a deal can look reasonable by comparison while still costing more than it should.

The monitoring criterion is worth noting too — the checklist explicitly downgrades transactions where benefits would be hard to verify (dispersed inflow, no equipment in place to measure flow), which is a real acknowledgment that a water deal on paper isn't the same as water reaching the lake.

The Flexibility Clause

The document ends with a footnote that applies to the whole framework: flexibility in evaluation is described as important so that unique or creative options aren't excluded.

What's Not Asked

Across all 15 threshold and desired criteria, none of them ask a version of: is the seller, lessor, or counterparty connected to anyone who reviews or approves this transaction? Not the Trust Council members, not the Commissioner, not Trust staff.

Two related gaps stand out for the same reason:

• No public input criterion. Despite "community" appearing as one of several benefits a deal can provide, nothing in the framework asks whether the affected community was consulted or supports the transaction — consistent with what this docket has already documented about the Trust Council's own bylaws, where public participation in meetings is discretionary rather than guaranteed.
• No explicit water-right seniority weighting. A water right being "too junior to be distributed" appears only as an example negative finding under the physical-pathway threshold, not as its own scored criterion — meaning how much weight priority date actually carries in a real evaluation isn't clear from this document.

Why This Connects

This docket's companion piece on the Advisory Council and Trust Council documents that at least two Trust Council members — Timothy Hawkes (Aquaculture) and Joe Havasi (Mineral Extraction) — hold industry-affiliated seats on the Trust Council while also sitting on the public Advisory Council. Neither this evaluation framework nor the Trust Council's own bylaws, as reviewed for that piece, require checking whether a proposed water transaction's counterparty has ties to a reviewing member.

To be clear about what is and isn't established here: this piece has not identified a specific transaction where a Trust Council member had an undisclosed stake in the counterparty. The finding is narrower and still worth having on the record — the written framework used to screen deals doesn't ask the question in the first place.

Questions Worth Asking

For readers who want to press further:

1. Does the Trust disclose, before or after a deal closes, who it's negotiating a water transaction with?
2. Has any transaction ever been approved despite failing one of the seven threshold criteria, using the framework's own "flexibility" clause?
3. Should a conflict-of-interest question be added to this checklist, given that Trust Council members hold industry seats?
4. Who verifies, after a deal closes, that the promised water actually reached the lake?

Graded by the Rubric

Every case in this docket is graded against The Weber County Hive's standing five-part rubric — Power, Transparency, Financial Accountability, Environmental Impact, and Community Impact — not this reporter's opinion. The rubric asks the same five questions of every piece regardless of subject.