Feedback from August 11 and Beyond 

click to enlarge

Citizen Proofreader
Arggh! In the Aug. 11 Hits & Misses, the third item ("Read No Evil") has this last sentence: "Yup, the new law tries yet again to define pornography." Nowhere in the item is there any mention of any sort of "new law." The rest is about a school district pulling books.

How is a reader supposed to know what is being talked about? This supposed "new law" isn't explained in the following sentences either, since there aren't any.

I know deadlines must be tight, but please try to proofread better. The second H & M item last week, "Sour Streets," also had a problem. It claimed there are conflicting views on whether SLC is a good bicycling city.

It cites reasonable evidence in favor, but for "against," it just splats out numbers that don't tell the reader anything because they're A. for the state, not the city and B. aren't compared to what would be good or bad. So 1% of residents commute by bike. What percent would make a city a bicycling city? 0.9%? 1.5%? 10%?
KEITH ALLEMAN
Salt Lake City

"Low Liquidity," Aug. 4 Hits & Misses
Katharine Biele's column commends respondents to a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll for being willing to consider a wide range of options for solving Utah's water scarcity. That's encouraging, but reducing domestic use—other than perhaps lawn watering—is essentially irrelevant, aside from showing that we're all suffering and sharing the burden.

Residential uses make up a very small proportion of total water use, and any serious strategy has to resolve the complex issues surrounding agricultural use and legacy water rights. But one area where municipal use probably could—and should—be reduced is in eliminating leakage from municipal systems. That's just pure waste.

The latest report I can find online is the Utah State Water Plan for 2013, which includes this truly amazing statement: "Fixing water leaks has not traditionally been part of future water planning." (Internationally—meaning everywhere except Utah—it is widely recognized that reducing unaccounted-for water, while unglamorous and rarely providing opportunities for politicians to grandstand, is almost always the cheapest way to augment available supply).

The report provided Salt Lake City data for 2003 (so already 10 years out of date then) as showing leakage of 4.3 million gallons per day, "a very creditable performance for a utility that does not have [an] active leakage control programme." To its credit, Salt Lake City took action, and its water conservation plan in 2020 reported losses for 2016-2018 as averaging around 11% of production. However, those numbers still were not up-to-date, and significantly above the average reported in the State Water Plan (8.4%).

For comparison, Singapore—which is vulnerable because it's largely dependent on water from Malaya (and was forced to surrender to the Japanese in World War II because they had seized control of this water supply)—reports losses around 5%.

I suggest that public utilities make us all aware of what it is doing and what it hopes to achieve, perhaps by adding a quarterly bulletin in its monthly billings. And, if we are serious about protecting Utah's agricultural sector in a time of increasing scarcity, what about bringing in an expert from—say—Israel, which has ample experience in growing high-value crops in a desert environment?

Perhaps then we could stop exporting alfalfa (and by extension, the water used to grow it) to China.
RICHARD MIDDLETON
Salt Lake City

Care to sound off on a feature in our pages or about a local concern? Write to comments@cityweekly.net or post your thoughts on our social media. We want to hear from you!