I lived in northern UT for most of my life. I moved away. When I returned just last month, it felt like a dustbowl from Salt Lake down to the valley. It seemed that more of the soil would be picked up by the wind. That soil has a high level of arsenic in it which could make the air quality even worse than it already has been due to the inversions and refineries.
The one official says confidently that the drought won't last forever, but there is scientific evidence that current conditions are much closer to long term historical norms than what we have been living with.
Do you mean that drought is more common than what we have been experiencing?
No - they're saying that what we call "drought" isn't actually drought, in historical context. It just seems that way if we're looking at too short of a timescale.
A human lifetime is a very short timescale. It is possible for something to be "short lived" in a geological sense, but still be devastating to multiple generations of humans.
Another interpretation is, that the drought is part of reverting to a trend line that is not as convenient to what we've been trying to do in the SLC area, as the past couple of centuries were.
Kind of makes sense. The lake has been drying down since it was Lake Bonneville that covered much of the area in ancient times. You can even see the old Bonneville water line on the mountain ridge.