Utah Architect Pursues Dream: a Low-Salt Lake

Don David Johnson, free-lance architect and relentless visionary, may yet realize his peculiar dream of turning much of the Great Salt Lake into an immense freshwater reservoir.

“What I see,” said Johnson recently, “is the opportunity now to create a life style that is enjoyed in California and Florida . . . a water-based life style.”

Johnson imagines marina-style housing tracts with a boat dock in every back yard, tree-lined causeways for a Sunday driver’s scenic loop around the lake’s islands, water skiing, beaches, hotels and, not least, tourists spending freely in the thrall of mighty sunsets.

No matter the lake’s international image as a natural wonder of the world, the notion of taming and sweetening it has tempted some Utahans since the first settlers arrived. For the inland sea that displays such grandeur on a post card has always been hard to live with at close quarters.

Lake Not Picture-Perfect

It can smell like a sewer. It can become so choked with translucent brine shrimp that it looks like a swarming fish tank. Worse, unpredictable fluctuations of the water level over time have flooded out, or left high and dry, every structure built on its shores.

And that shoreline is nothing to write home about, either, being mostly sticky, salt-soaked mud flats.

In recent years, the water has been at a record-high level. And so the golden, Oriental turrets of Saltair, its sole resort, now rest atop a wave-blasted concrete shell, shielded from further destruction only by a barrier of bulldozed rock. Previous Saltairs, beginning with a legendary 19th-Century bathhouse and dance pavilion, have met similar fates, as have boat docks, built-up sand beaches and various mineral-extraction projects. These days, many locals repeat weary jokes about the Not-So-Great Salt Lake and the Great Dead Salt Lake when visiting relatives suggest driving out to go for a float.

Dikes along the inhabited eastern side have always seemed the best way to control the water level. A stable water line would give a permanent shore and allow for a reasonable return on a developer’s investment.

But every dike scheme has proved too expensive. Meanwhile, for six years, Johnson has been talking up his plan, which he contends will cut that cost by as much as two-thirds. And now, powerful financial and political allies have quietly picked up his cause.

At the least, the Utah Legislature, the state’s second-largest bank and many of its biggest industries plan to see that Johnson’s proposal gets a good test. And Republican Gov. Norman H. Bangerter has just named a panel to oversee formal study of the idea.

Much rests, however, on the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged with protecting the nation’s wetlands. Accommodation also must be reached with what Johnson calls those “selfish,” even “un-American” environmentalists, hunters and others who would preserve those wetlands no matter the potential recreational interests of hundreds of thousands of sightseers and waterfront homeowners.

In fact, the Great Salt Lake is an important oasis for migratory birds traveling the Pacific and Central flyways. Waterfowl hunters and other conservationists fear that Johnson’s dikes could eliminate as much as 400,000 acres of bird-nurturing wetland, and they’re beginning to take him seriously as well.

Phil Wagner, regional director of Ducks Unlimited, the nationwide waterfowl hunters’ organization, has lately made the rounds of government regulatory agencies, trying to enlist incredulous bureaucrats in opposition.

“If you go to these various offices,” said Wagner, shaking his head, “they say, ‘They’ll never build it.’ I say, ‘Read their papers.’ ”

Affluent private duck clubs already are making uneasy peace with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, as well as government conservationists, and they even talk of ties to Utah’s conservative tax revolters--all against powerboat owners, developers and politicians bent on pulling Utah out of its current economic slump.

Meanwhile, Johnson faces his formidable opponents and their regulations with the stubborn faith of a 19th-Century entrepreneur. If, in some future environmental impact report, “they find some bug that they aren’t going to have anymore,” Johnson intoned, “they’ll stop it.” But he said this with a long-suffering, optimistic smile.

Johnson’s plan is cheap enough to be taken seriously because, unlike traditional dikes, it would use fill material held in place by precast concrete walls. Johnson’s other passion is precast concrete.

“It’s the only thing to build, in my mind,” he said one afternoon, sitting in his round concrete living room in his round concrete house.

The house is back among trees, on a steep street overlooking the lakeside town of Bountiful. Johnson is a tall man with wavy, silver hair. He almost always wears a suit and big, black Wellington boots. “My gosh!” and “Good heavens!” are the roughest terms he’ll use in public. “Oh-ho!” he says cheerfully whenever he spots a chink in an environmentalist argument.

He draped one arm expansively across the back of an overstuffed couch and, in a soft voice, told how he put up his house 20 years ago. It was hung together in six hours by a crane operator and a few relatives. Each precast concrete section came finished, with exterior decorative rock, insulation, window casings and inside wall surfaces ready for paint.

“The roof is strong enough to support a truck,” said Johnson. “Actually a dump truck. You could drive around on the roof. It’s almost, I think, indestructible, in that it can’t burn or be destroyed by earthquake.”

And it was cheap. If the same mold can be used over and over, as in Johnson’s round house, precast concrete costs much less than conventional construction methods. Johnson paid $4,000 for the wall, ceiling and floor modules for his home, about the price of the brick alone for a brick house. Only such features as the sparkly ceilings and a chartreuse shag carpet were extra.

The houses Johnson would like to build now would have additional attractions. For one thing, they could be adjusted to changing family size. Lightweight, movable inside walls would be key to that.

“Movable, and not only that, wifeable,” Johnson said pleasantly. “Your wife could move the partition. You could come home one day and your wife has not only moved the furniture, but the entire house.”

Or, he said, expanding the vision, when you have your daughter’s wedding, you take out the interior walls to make room for the reception, then replace them--minus one bedroom now that she’s gone.

What Johnson has actually built over the years are 30 precast concrete commercial buildings--bank branches, credit-union offices and the like. And he has developed his technique. Now he can pour and hang panels that are four stories high and 20 feet wide.

In fact, two parallel rows of his big panels, sunk into the soft lake bed and filled in between with sand, constitute the core idea of Johnson’s inexpensive dike.

Johnson smiled and opened a thick ring binder to illustrate the next stages of his dream.

Dikes will link two long islands, cutting off a third of the lake. The eastern side of the lake will begin to rise, since all the fresh water enters there. Conduits will run through the dikes, from the high to low side. In as little as a year, in the estimate of some Johnson partisans, gravity will flush the old lake water through the conduits into the western, salty side.

Then comes the water-based life style.

Johnson flipped to color copies of magazine pages showing houses with boats docked out back. Some are of a development in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Some are from Discovery Bay, near Sacramento. Some are from locales whose names have slipped Johnson’s mind.

“This is what we now have,” he said with disgust as he flipped to a photo of a brown mud flat.

Then he turned to a new imaginary scene, retouched by felt-tip pen, of dockside homes with the mountains of Bountiful in the background.

“Bountiful-by-the-Sea,” he announced with a dead-straight face.

In Johnson’s scheme, tax revenues from the increased value of shorefront properties pay for the dikes. Some engineers who have looked at his plans think it also might offer an economical solution to Utah’s coming shortage of potable water.

Far less enthusiastic is George Wilson of the Utah Division of Wildlife Management, who came to the defense of the unlovely mud flats one Sunday morning as he walked along the dike at Willard Bay, at the northeast corner of the Great Salt Lake. Willard Bay is a freshwater reservoir and recreational area built next to the lake years ago. It uses about as much dike as Johnson proposes for his plan, though that dike encircles far less water.

Birds’ Feeding Ground

On the reservoir side, fishermen in one small boat stayed close to the rock barrier, angling for walleyed pike. On the lake side, birds worked the mud flats, rooting and scratching for small crustaceans and insect larvae.

“People don’t understand what wetlands are,” Wilson said with a sigh. “It’s not just cattails, but secluded mud and water too. And it’s the open lake, not just the refuges.”

Before the recent years of flooding, ducks, geese, various wading birds, endangered bald eagles and peregrine falcons, muskrats, weasels, beaver, raccoon and skunks all depended on the wetlands of the lake’s eastern shore, most of which remain under water.

No one is sure what the high water has done, but some figures show dramatic shifts in migratory patterns. Peak population counts of visiting tundra swans--formerly known as whistling swans--dropped from 65,000 in 1982 to 400 in 1987. A million pintail ducks commonly stopped off at the lake each summer in the 1960s and early ‘70s, on their way to Southern California. Now, no more than 10,000 drop in to feed.

The dispute, oddly enough, is not over saline or fresh water, but the height of the lake. Johnson’s new water line would have to be high enough to border on private, not state, land. Otherwise, he cannot get permission to build the waterfront life style that would pay for the dikes.

Permanent Submersion

But this would leave permanently submerged most of the old wetlands, developed and maintained by various conservation groups since the 1920s.

Johnson and his supporters say a freshwater lake would create new and better wetlands, but offer no specifics. Environmentalists ask where this miracle would occur, since a high lake would bring the water up against expensive agricultural land.

Environmentalists also question just how fresh Johnson’s sweetened lake would be. Willard Bay is the state’s most popular water-based park and is packed with water-skiers in summer. But many of the game fish stocked there have died out. And, after 20 years, the water is murky year-round.

A worse example is freshwater Utah Lake. The summer algae blooms there have given rise to “Ski the Scum” T-shirts. Environmentalists contend that Johnson’s freshwater lake, formed over the residue of a century’s worth of raw sewage and dumped heavy metals, would be no better.

“I like to think of it as Lake Wobegon,” said George Wilson, “where they think everyone will be happy and prosperous--but it won’t be.”

Picking a Study Panel

Actually, Lake Wasatch (taken from the name of the bordering mountains) is what Johnson calls his vision. Undeterred by such carping is the Lake Wasatch Coalition, Johnson’s loosely knit group of supporters, who include bankers, land developers, public-finance attorneys, engineers and politicians.

Recently, the coalition got together in the paneled boardroom of Zions First National Bank. Johnson, in a dark suit, brought up his worries about the unexpected resistance he had encountered from the Army Corps of Engineers.

“This is going to be a very severe problem,” he said, frowning. The head of the corps’ Salt Lake City regulatory office had told him that, so far, he saw “no way” under federal law that the old wetlands could be developed for housing.

David Hemingway, the exuberant vice president for investment at Zions bank and president of the Lake Wasatch Coalition, counseled patience.

Banker’s Optimism

“I don’t think that at this point we should be discouraged,” Hemingway said brightly. “Enough people believed that it was worth proceeding, and governmental regulations are not the Ten Commandments.”

In fact, this meeting was to decide whom the group would recommend to Gov. Bangerter for the new Great Salt Lake Authority that is to take over further study of the project. The men expected their recommendations to be well received, since the governor is an unabashed developer himself. Still, they wanted to be sure that Bangerter had plenty of “forward-looking” types, as Hemingway put it, to choose from.

“We’ve got a glaring omission,” Brent R. Armstrong, a tax and corporate attorney, said as potential appointees were brought up for discussion. “We don’t have one birds-and-bunnies guy on this whole list.”

Others called for adding a woman or two. Adjustments were made to the list of names.

Pro-Dike Commission

A month later, as they had hoped, Bangerter picked a panel with a clear pro-dike majority, including Hemingway and another coalition member. And results of a recent poll published in the Salt Lake Tribune showed voters in the four lakeside counties to be roughly split on the issue, with 9% of them yet to make up their minds.

Meanwhile, watching from the sidelines has been Long John Silver, a Great Salt Lake visionary in his own right.

Now 79 and hard of hearing, he still goes out several days a week to keep an eye on his investment, the boarded-up Saltair resort. Silver adopted his nickname when he was a dealer in TV sets and appliances, and kept the persona when he went on to develop Treasure Island resort, Silver Sands Beach and finally, Saltair III. In each case, the rising lake ran him out of business.

On a recent afternoon, Silver, wearing a bolo tie clasped with a gold doubloon, spoke of the days when sea monsters were said to live in the lake, when a great whirlpool allegedly sucked water into an underground system that emptied into the Pacific Ocean, when he and his sons searched the islands for buried treasure.

Pioneer Son’s View

Silver thinks Johnson’s dikes would be popular. He cited the fascination people have always shown for the irascible body of water, even in the time of his great-grandfather, Brigham Young.

Young, the pioneer Mormon leader, enjoyed taking visitors on lake tours in his paddle-wheeled boat, the Timely Gull, which was powered by two horses on treadmills. He apparently liked the lake just as it was.

“I don’t think he really had a dream for the lake,” said Silver. “He just loved it.”

Of course, Young never tried to build a condominium on its undependable shore.