- Salt Lake City resumes foothill trail expansion plan after a nearly five-year pause.
- City Council approved using remaining $200,000 set aside for trail construction.
- New strategy focuses on seven zones, addressing past planning and construction issues.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's capital city is finally ready to move forward with an expansion of its popular foothills trails following a nearly five-year snag in the program.
Members of the Salt Lake City Council agreed on Tuesday to let the city's public lands use the remaining $200,000 in trail construction funding it had held when the city paused the program in 2021 amid issues with the initial phase of the new trails.
"This has been a lot longer pause than any of us ever anticipated," said Salt Lake City Councilman Chris Wharton, one of two remaining City Council holdovers from when the Foothills Trail Master Plan was enacted in 2020 and then paused.
Their informal vote came after Tyler Fonarow, recreational trails program manager for the Salt Lake City Public Lands, offered an update on the master plan, about a year and a half after he first unveiled the city's new strategy to expand recreational trails.
The department decided to divide its foothills into seven zones rather than view the some 6,000 acres as one large entity. This allows planners to zero in on specific needs for each zone, such as agreements with outside landowners, including the U.S. Forest Service, and various state and local entities.
It also planned to adopt a slower, more detailed approach to new construction to avoid the hurdles encountered in the initial rollout of trails.
Salt Lake City leaders approved the new trails master plan in March 2020, which aimed to create more trails in the foothills, since they're heavily used by hikers and mountain bikers alike. It proved serendipitous, as demand for trails increased during the COVID-19 pandemic later that year.
However, residents raised concerns about the initial rollout of new trails above the Avenues, which led to the pause. Independent consultants eventually determined that "inefficient planning" resulted in "poor construction quality" and other issues.
Their report inspired the new format. City leaders allowed the department to resume using allocated funds for planning and design phases in 2024, but the department declined to spend any of those funds on trail construction until it had a finalized process for future trail development.
All the key foothills landowners met last year and hammered out a yet-to-be-signed working agreement outlining the future of new trails, Fonarow said on Tuesday. It's still awaiting a snag from the federal government to be cleared before it's signed, but he said entities still meet bimonthly to discuss new foothills trails.
This was something that was worth taking the time to get right, so I'm really glad we are at this point.
–Salt Lake City Councilman Chris Wharton
They agree that "safe, accessible and high-quality recreation" is needed, while also protecting the environment, natural resources, cultural history and public utilities found in the area. These also deliver greater rule consistency among landowners.
"Our goal is to create and implement a common strategic vision for the foothills," he said, adding that it would include consistent planning and maintenance, and other elements, to help improve the user experience.
A "community stakeholder group" was also created to gather feedback from residents, including the Salt Lake City Parks, Natural Lands, Urban Forestry and Trails Advisory Board. The board's Foothills Committee will serve as a community working group to assist in planning efforts and management decisions in some capacity.
These groups will explore options for each zone in turn, starting with a baseline review of the area when a new project is initiated in the planning phase. Designs will be proposed after that and finalized before the city reaches out to contractors in a bidding process, and, ultimately, a new trail is constructed.
Wharton and others on the City Council thanked the department and residents for their help since the pause, before conducting the straw poll.
"I really appreciate the patience. ... This was something that was worth taking the time to get right, so I'm really glad we are at this point," he said.
Planning has already started with the city's East City Creek and Twin Peaks zones, which run from City Creek Canyon to a section near Block U. That's where the initial post-pause projects will go, potentially beginning as early as this summer, now that the new process and construction funding have been approved, Fonarow said.
Additional funding requests are expected with other foothills projects as the project finally moves forward.
