Less than a year after facing off in Logan's mayoral election, Mark Anderson and Alanna Nafziger are competing again — this time for a seat on the Cache Water District board.
Now as Logan's mayor, Anderson is seeking reelection to the Logan District 3 seat, which he's already held for four years.
His opponent, Nafziger, is a landscape architect and urban planner who wants to change how the district approaches water management.
At the center of their race is the proposed $310 million Logan River Watershed Project — a plan to modernize aging irrigation infrastructure and improve flood control. But the proposal has also raised concerns about the Little Logan River, where changes to water diversions could substantially reduce flows.
Nafziger wants the district to abandon the plan.
“I think that the district should definitely not go through with the Logan River Watershed Plan," she said. "I think this project is going to end up being incredibly costly for taxpayers, and that they're really the ones footing the bill.”
Anderson said the proposal began as an effort to update irrigation infrastructure but has since expanded to include several other improvements — some of which have faced public pushback.
“What a lot of people don't understand is we don't have to do everything that's in the plan," he said. "We can pick and choose the pieces that we want. So there's plans for secondary water, there's plans for fixing floodplains — I think probably for Logan, that's one of the most important things.”
Some of the planned improvements, Anderson said, could leave more water flowing through the Logan River during irrigation season.
Aside from the watershed project, both candidates want the district to take a more active role in water conservation.
Anderson said the district currently focuses on helping communities coordinate projects and secure funding.
“What I'd really like to see," he said, "is the district start to accumulate a little bit more money, so we can go out and we can buy water shares, or we can buy water rights, and then we can actually lease those to other people.”
He added that the district could potentially lease those rights to the state to help get more water to the Great Salt Lake.
That's a goal Nafziger shares.
“I think that we need to be really aggressively making sure that the water is reaching the lake," she said. "So whether that's leasing water rights to the Great Salt Lake or whatever that is, we should be doing it.”
Despite their recent mayoral showdown, neither candidate is actively campaigning for the unpaid water district position.
