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.