Facing a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, Salt Lake City has tweaked some key water consumption caps in ways that could limit the facility’s access to water.
The rule changes — a late addition to Tuesday’s City Council agenda — could effectively limit the agency’s warehouse at 6020 W. 300 South to 200,000 gallons a day.
In a statement Tuesday, Mayor Erin Mendenhall linked the new changes to the water ordinance with the ICE facility, as part of what she said was her responsibility “to ensure residents have access to clean water, reliable utilities, and safe infrastructure.”
“Put simply, a potential high-occupancy facility interferes with those needs,” the mayor said. “While we lack direct information from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a 7,500-person detention facility on our city’s west side would likely use 1-2 million gallons of water per day. By comparison, the warehouse recently purchased previously used about 5,600 gallons daily.”
The city has opposed a potential ICE detention facility within its boundaries since news broke this month that the agency bought a massive warehouse.
That Homeland Security announcement has sparked widespread blowback from community members and elected leaders and inspired at least two public protests, including one outside the warehouse that drew hundreds of participants.
What’s changing
Tuesday’s code changes — which the City Council passed on a fast track — are largely technical tweaks to an existing ordinance that limits industrial and commercial water use to 200,000 gallons a day.
Urged by Mendenhall and put into effect for the next 180 days, the latest revisions:
• Apply to brand-new developments proposed in Utah’s capital under a wider definition of “nonresidential” uses, as opposed to only commercial and industrial uses that were previously outlined in code. They also forbid proposed expansions of existing facilities that would push above that water consumption limit.
• Narrow a host of exemptions to that water consumption cap by basically eliminating a previously existing blanket exemption for “government-owned or operated facilities.” Now, such government facilities can only be exempt where they “primarily provide social services.”
• Give the city’s public utilities director leeway in denying water services to new or existing customers in circumstances where their consumption exceeding the cap on a short-term basis might pose a strain to a portion of the city’s system.
The new rules, Mendenhall said, enact tighter restrictions on all government entities, ensuring new water usage by such facilities is in line with city capacity.
The actual language in city code supporting the water ordinance tweaks make no mention of the warehouse. Nor did the council discuss the ICE facility as part of its own deliberations at a meeting Tuesday afternoon.
How much water is needed?
It’s unclear how many people the Salt Lake City detention center is expected to hold or how much water it is estimated to use.
Last month, the public utilities director of a Maryland city tasked with providing water to an ICE warehouse estimated the facility might consume 75,000 to 150,000 gallons a day. The director hesitated to commit to a number because she didn’t know how exactly the warehouse would be used.
The Maryland warehouse has similar square footage to the Utah facility and is expected to hold 1,500 people.
As ICE has moved rapidly across the country to acquire and convert warehouses for use as processing and detention facilities, water supplies have become a recurring theme in municipal and community resistance.
Mendenhall has previously promised to fight the Utah ICE facility with “every tool at the city’s disposal.”
Last week, the mayor sent a letter to ICE acting director Todd Lyons, seeking more information on the agency’s plans for the 833,000-square-feet warehouse and highlighting the city’s emerging concerns.
In the letter — copied to Utah’s Republican delegation in Congress — Mendenhall told Lyons that a detention center on the site threatens to overwhelm sewer capacity in that west-side area as well as strain police, fire and emergency medical services.
The neighborhood’s sewer system was not developed for such around-the-clock usage, the mayor said, and the detention facility could cause downstream effects. If the building hosted ICE detainees, she noted, the city might have to make significant upgrades to its utility systems.
Citywide call for cuts
The city’s temporary water rules have also come less than a week after Mendenhall declared a “Stage 2” response to some of the warmest winter conditions Utah has seen in its history of weather record-keeping.
Under that Stage 2 phase — a first since October 2022 — city officials are calling for a reduction of 10 million gallons in water consumption across the city daily, through voluntary cuts by residents and businesses in both indoor and outdoor water usage.
“Even with strong reservoir storage, the unusually low snowpack and reduced stream flows mean we need to act now to stretch our water resources,” Laura Briefer, the city’s public utilities director, said last week in a statement. “Saving water today helps ensure reliability for our community and contributes to the long-term sustainability of the Great Salt Lake.”
State law allows temporary land use rules like those adopted Tuesday to be enacted without typical in-depth review, but only where the council finds “a compelling countervailing public interest.” And with its vote Tuesday, the council agreed, finding “that conserving city water resources by enacting the daily water use cap on new development” met the legal criteria of “a compelling, countervailing public interest” and justified the expedited changes.