[jubguy3]

As a salt laker I'm happy to see my city plugged here a lot. But I'm skeptical - the Wasatch Front is expected to grow to a population of 4.5 mil by 2060 IIRC. That scares me. I want to see the american west preserved in its natural beauty, and maybe with some super aggressive initiatives we could keep SLC on its current footprint. But the biggest issue is water - we are expected to plunge in to a mega drought. In a wealthy society like ours water should not be a scarce commodity. There are loads of entitled people here - usually the product of conservative thinking - that feel the dirty scum below them don't deserve water but they do because they are white and straight and old. Ooh, and RioTintoKennecott! If you ignore the fact that they are stealing our water, polluting our land, and responsible for 10 percent of our air quality emissions, they are a great company leading our New Urbanist movement (which lots of entitled pricks have told me is, I kid you not, a socialist plot by Obama to make our communities gay.) but they are responsible for so much loss of water and clean air here. We have this issue of natural resources here in the west that is a foreign concept to people from the east. So while I'm excited for the growth to come, I think some work needs to be done to kick out old crabs in our legislature who block everything and see our resources as something that can't go away and don't give a a shit because they are going to die in 20 years, and to bring in people who are about the future, not about their pockets. Because we will literally cripple our economy if we dont take the right steps.