Watch your step for human poop in Big Cottonwood Canyon- a fecal time bomb

Salt Lake City, please stop this environmental injustice.  

Mayor Erin Mendenhall, please remember how great Salt Lake City is,  how it loves pure, daylighted, beautiful creeks. Remember that kindness is the essence of greatness.  Please keep our creeks pure.

Kindly ask SLC Public Utilities to  1) stop the poop by adding 50 toilets to Big Cottonwood and 50 toilets to Little Cottonwood Canyon, 2) stop putting dirty Utah Lake water in pure Big Cottonwood Creek,  Little Cottonwood Creek, and City Creek, and 3) stop drying up the creeks for extra "surplus" water money.

What's the point of daylighting pure creeks back to life then putting dirty Utah Lake water in daylighted creeks choking them to death?

Why does SLC Public Utilities force about 5 billion gallons annually of water to waste from Big Cottonwood Creek in a desert state like Utah?

How is wasting an amount of water equal to the operational capacity of Utah's Deer Creek Reservoir kind or sustainable?   

If it was not ok to degrade Farmington Creek, Parley's Creek, and the American Fork River and kill fish rarely and accidentally, then how is it ok to routinely and not accidentally kill fish in Big Cottonwood Creek for SLC "surplus water" money?

1.7 million visitors and 15 toilets in Big Cottonwood Canyon doesn't flush.  Why is SLC Public Utilities anti-toilets in the canyons? Chlorinated poop in tap water is all the pleasure of drinking poop without the risk of infection.

Dangerous water infected with Anatoxin-a, also known as Very Fast Death Factor (VRDF), and other cynaotoxins should not be put in Salt Lake County's pure eastside creeks running through a lattice work of abandoned ditches through eastside backyards. 

Creeks are living entities with basic rights to be pure, beautiful, and clean.   Natural creeks are not open ditches, sewers, and toilets.  It's un-natural, un-friendly, and un-healthy  for Big Cottonwood Creek to look and smell like the pictures in the photo gallery.  Contact Salt Lake City Mayor's Team 801-535-7704 mayor@slcgov.com

At the front door, Salt Lake City residents are water shamed into paying high water conservation rates with tall tales of water shortages while SLC Inc. sells billions of gallons of "surplus" water directly and indirectly for $25 million in Weber County, Park City, Heber Valley, Millcreek, Cottonwood Heights, and 4 ski resorts out the back door.  Part of the 'surplus' water game dries up Big Cottonwood Creek and Little Cottonwood Creek to make more "surplus water" money.  Some of our State/County/City water policies need to be obeyed instead of winked at.

Salt Lake City, a truly great city,  grabbed water for 2 million people, but wall to wall cities and the CUP ended their water empire dreams.  SLC's population is 200,000 or 1/10th of their water empire dream creating a huge water hoarding problem.  Water hoarding is the justification for Salt Lake City to control the canyons "to protect the watershed."  "We own all the water."  "We are protecting our water" - that virtually no one drinks and billions of gallons are forced to waste.

 About 99.8% of Big Cottonwood Creek water is never drunk from the tap.  On average 57% of Big Cottonwood Creek water never enters the treatment plant and never will.  Of the 43% that is treated, 75% of that is for lawn water.  So what's the hyperbolic watershed protection story for? Money and power to devalue land to add to SLC's 31,000 acre canyon (50 square miles) land hoard. It appears no toilets have been installed on SLC's 31,000 (50 square miles) by the watershed stewards. 

Why is Salt Lake City Public Utilities (a watershed steward) anti-toilet in our canyons?

Affordable housing advocate Salt Lake City has built no affordable campground sites on its 31,000 acres (50 square miles) for the campless, the  poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised who can't afford $30 a night to camp.  It appears Salt Lake City has unintentionally created a class of campless people cut out of their own canyons.

A Forest Service grade vaulted toilet installed is about $40,000.  It's canyon politics that has crapped up our canyons. Every 3 years, Salt Lake City spends $1 Billion from city budgets or $2.25 billion if the SLC Enterprise Businesses are included, yet no new canyon toilets. 

Salt Lake County has a $1.5 billion budget, but no new toilets. Mountain Accord ran through $8 million, but no new toilets.  Central Wasatch Commission has ran through $2 million, but no new toilets. 

The politics is that bikers "prefer" to bike back into a wilderness experience, commune with nature, then commute home in the same day so they are against seeing toilets.  A toilet means a road for the septic tank truck to come and empty it.  Bikers don't want to see a poop pumper on their roads so no toilets.  Better to crap up or let the canyon burn down than to have a toilet or fire hydrant needing a road.  It's selfish, short sighted and environmentally unjust. 

SLC Public Utilities gives $150,000 to the County Sheriff Dept, sometimes $37,000 to the Forest Service, and tens of thousands to the Town of Alta for extra watershed patrols instead of 4 new toilets a year.  There is plenty of money.  It should and could be spent more effectively for toilets. 

SLC Public Utilities also has a $1 million armed watershed police force unlike any of the other 566 of 567 Utah's Public Water Providers providing safe drinking water with no armed watershed police.

If that $1 million were re-purposed, SLC could put 25 new toilets in the Wasatch a year.  SLC won't. The watershed police force is not about water quality because 99.8% of Utah's Public Water Providers provide safe drinking water without an armed watershed police. It's un-elected employees inserting their personal likes and dislikes into the city budgets for their own purposes instead of better public purposes like toilets, canyon drinking water, and fire hydrants. 

Dead fish from toxic algae poisoning enter the food chain poisoning birds and other wildlife.


"Algal toxins poison 60,000 people around the world every year."

Never has Big Cottonwood Creek ever had a toxic algal bloom infection except for the fact of Salt Lake City drying up the creek and putting dirty Utah Lake water into a clean creek.