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.
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.
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.