FAIRVIEW CANYON—About 25 people with an interest or stake in a potential Gooseberry Narrows State Park gathered at the site last Thursday, April 9, to look at, and talk about, what Utah Sen. Derrin Owens called the “Lazarus Project.”

What did he mean by that? Essentially that a project that has been pending for 89 years, one that many have considered dead, may be coming back to life.

“This is a sliver of hope,” Owens said. “We can tell the sad story that’s happened for the last 90 years. It is a sad story. I think there’s a possible beautiful ending. But this is the only sliver of hope that is left.”

Besides Owens, and Utah Rep. Troy Shelley, both of whom represent Sanpete County in the Utah State Legislature, the group at the site included U.S. Congressman Burgess Owens, and representatives from the offices of U.S. Congressman Mike Kennedy and U.S. Senators John Curtis and Mike Lee.

There was a Sanpete County commissioner, the mayor and water superintendent from Fairview, people from Utah State Parks and a new project engineer who has taken over from the engineer who worked on the project for nearly 40 years. The original engineer has retired.

The Gooseberry Narrows project goes back before World War II, when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made plans to build one reservoir serving Carbon County and one storing water for diversion to Sanpete County. The Carbon County reservoir was built. The Sanpete project got stopped by the war. After that, it got stopped by opposition from Carbon County.

The water destined for Sanpete County was water that originated on the eastern slope of the Wasatch Plateau, an area mostly in Carbon County. But some land just over the crest of the mountain is within Sanpete County boundaries.

There were multiple lawsuits. At one point, to try to negotiate and settle one of the suits, the Sanpete Water Conservancy District (SWCD), the entity representing the county on the issue, offered to drop its claim to two-thirds of the water it regarded as belonging to Sanpete.

The amount of water the county was seeking dropped from 17,000 to 5,400 acre feet. Ultimately, the courts upheld Sanpete County claims to that reduced volume of water.

In the early 2000s, and continuing until about 2017, the county commission and SWCD renewed its claims. There were more studies, detailed plans for a dam and reservoir were issued, there were appeals for the public to send in comments and a new environmental assessment (the third) was prepared. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation even issued a consequential “record of decision” approving the project.

But the Army Corps of Engineers, which has final jurisdiction over all surface water in the United States, rejected the project pending yet another environmental study. The county commission and, to a degree, the SWCD gave up.

Then, early in the 2026 Legislature, Sen. Owens suggested building the dam and reservoir as a state park. With the chronic water shortage, he said, the state was looking for sites for high elevation reservoirs that could capture and store water near its point of origin.

The Utah Department of Natural Resources has identified 800 sites, the senator reported. The Gooseberry Narrows is No. 2 in priority. One of the main reasons is that a public entity, the SWCD, owns the water.

Sen. Owens’ legislation to the Gooseberry site as a state park did not get much traction. What the Legislature did do was approved a study. It directed Utah State Parks to evaluate the Narrows site, including “water quality, storage capacity and the impact on Scofield Reservoir and the Colorado River system.”

State parks was directed to report its findings by Nov. 30. From there, the Legislature would decide whether to designate the land in question as a state park. The next step after designation would be to fund the dam and, eventually, a boat ramp, campsite and other recreation facilities.

Meanwhile, it appears there would be nothing stopping the plan that has existed all along—diversion of 5,400 acre feet of water, said to equal about seven Palisade lakes, to Sanpete County.

Brian Andrew, the new project engineer, told the crowd there is a man-made channel running out of the reservoir site. The channel connects with a transmountain tunnel, in place for decades and upgraded in about 2010, that empties into the Fairview Canyon stream.

From there, the water would flow into the Sanpitch River, which runs south the length of the county. Along the way, water could be pulled out of the Sanpitch and delivered to farms and municipalities.