Underneath the Rivers:  Stewardship of Utah’s Sovereign Lands

Hi! My name is Tony. I work for the State of Utah as the Colorado & Green River Program Manager. Our team manages public access, commercial use, habitat conservation, fire fuel reduction, & infrastructure along the Green & Colorado Rivers in Eastern Utah. I came to Moab 12 years ago to work as a guide for SPLORE after hearing about the mighty Colorado River as an east-coast kayaker. After a few seasons river guiding and pruning trees for Triassic Industries, I came to my current job to combine my knowledge of river running and land stewardship. My time on the Colorado & Green has introduced me to my most true friends and deepest community connections; and I think I’m the luckiest to be able to work to protect and conserve this truly world-class natural resource.

Utah’s Sovereign Lands

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Utah DNR

Science Moab talks with Tony Mancuso, the Sovereign Lands Program Manager for the Green and Colorado Rivers at Utah’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). His management efforts focus on maintaining the health and navigability of waterways under state jurisdiction, including removing invasive species and restoring natural habitats. 

Science Moab: Can you explain the difference between State and Sovereign Lands in Utah?

Mancuso: There was a time when Sovereign Land and trust land was managed by the same agency, but in 1994, the Utah legislature realized that the management goals for sovereign land and the management goals for trust land are pretty different.

Sovereign lands are submerged land specifically. The land that is submerged underneath bodies of water that fit a legal definition called navigable.  Other navigable bodies of water in Utah are the Great Salt Lake, Bear Lake, the Bear River, and the Jordan River…the larger bodies of water in Utah. Our navigable rivers and their river beds are sovereign lands.

Science Moab: you’re managing lands that are submerged under a body of water. How do you go about managing that?

Mancuso: There are a few guidelines that we have as a state agency and they flow from the top. So at the very tip of the pyramid, all of our management ideology comes from Article 20 of the Utah Constitution, which says that all the state land that isn’t trust land is public land.

So we can’t dispose of it, we can’t sell it. It’s extremely hard to exchange it for another parcel of land. That’s all the land that isn’t SITLA land. That’s kinda like the foundation. 

 The state has identified five values that are water quality, wildlife, habitat, recreation, scenery, and navigability. So our main guideline is that anytime we have a proposed use of the River way, we have to measure the necessity of that use against the impacts that use would have against those five values. And if it doesn’t balance out in favor of the public trust, we need to figure out a way to either mitigate it, compensate the public, or we just can’t allow that to happen anymore. After that it gets really messy and we get into the 300 page documents…the management plans, the recreation plans and habitat plans, and a whole section of the government inside DNR and elsewhere.

Our partner agencies at BLM and the Park Service are just dedicated to understanding the science and what we should do with this moving forward.

Science Moab: What are some examples of specific places that met these certain criteria and you were called in to manage?

Mancuso: One that I’m pretty happy with and was a collaboration between a bunch of people who came together for a side channel upstream of New Rapid on the Moab Daily, on the river right side. There’s a side channel that flows about two and a half miles away from the river and then comes back to it. It completely diverts New Rapid. 

We collectively looked at this side channel, which was still very obviously there, but starting to get overgrown. We thought that by doing a little bit of work with light hand tools to take out all the plants in the channel, choking it up and  slowing the water down, that maybe we could increase the amount of water flowing through it.   When we started, it took about 24,000 cfs to even just get a little bit of water in there. Now we only need about 18,000 cfs. So that’s the idea…to get the river back to the spots where it should be…spread out and slowed down and more of a wetland habitat type feel. Yeah. That would’ve been much more similar to the Professor Valley we would’ve seen 150-200 years ago. 

Science Moab: And now that it’s connecting water, do you think just what you know of the river dynamics, you will need to do a lot more maintenance there or is Mother Nature going to take over?

Mancuso: There’s all these considerations:  the soil grain size and composition, the slope of the area, how frequently we get high water, whether or not the plants are behaving really aggressively or whether or not they’re chilling out.

I think it will be more consistent, but less intense work. Maybe we can do a little bit each year to keep it this way.

And that’s the idea. If we can just give nature a nudge into the direction of better wetlands, more native plants, more fish habitat, then we can take the resources and move on to the next one.

Science Moab: I know that you’ve been involved with Science Moab’s School to Science program with a couple of students coming along for job shadows. Can you describe what kind of project you were doing?

Mancuso: This was a project similar to the New Rapid Project where we’ve got a side channel, but it’s dried up and abandoned, and we want to see if we can get water back into it and make that habitat again.  This one was down in an area by Gold Bar.  We were showing the kids how we choose where we’re going to cut through these invasive plants to keep a side channel open and what techniques we use to monitor and map and report that work that we’re doing. The School of Science kids joined one of our River Ranger teams and shadowed them for a day while they went out and did an initial assessment. Then a second School to Science trip came back after the work was completed. In the meantime the Utah Conservation Corps did a lot of the work, cutting and piling all the invasive plants, and keeping that channel open. Then, the second School to Science trip went out and did the follow up and the quality control.

I get a real kick out of getting to do stuff like this. When we get to liaise with the community and show people the good work they’re doing. I love the outreach part. I really do.