Trail of neglect: Utah’s Jordan River Trail is in shambles. What plans are in motion to save it?

Editor’s note • This is the final installment of a three-part series on the challenges and triumphs of the Jordan River Trail, produced in partnership with City Cast Salt Lake. A podcast will follow the publication of this story. Subscribe to City Cast to receive each episode in your favorite podcast feed. Read Part 1 here and listen to the first podcast here. Read Part 2 here and listen to the second podcast here.

Part 3.

Ideas for improving the Jordan River and its trail are almost as diverse as the communities through which the waterway flows.

One company hopes to lure a Major League Baseball team to a new ballpark built alongside the stream — Salt Lake City’s answer to San Francisco’s McCovey Cove or Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River.

Another development on the opposite end of Salt Lake County aims to make the river and a tributary to it the main feature of a bustling mixed-use community.

Cities and advocates are looking for ways to prioritize nature conservation along the corridor, while also reframing the river as a hub for culture and community.

One philanthropic group made up of influential Utahns even wants to close off access to the river amid a proliferation of illegal homeless camps and eventually transform a portion of the corridor into a state park.

Many of the plans to shape the future of the Jordan River Trail match what west-side Salt Lake City Council member Alejandro Puy and his neighbors desire for the corridor.

“It is a place that feels safe, first of all, and it feels that you can connect with nature, that you could bring your kids or your pet or both, or just [be] alone in the river and enjoy, reconnect with nature and enjoy something amazing in an urban setting,” Puy said. “So, that is what the vision, in general, is, and I don’t think we are quite there yet in Salt Lake, at least.”

The future of the Jordan River promises to be a complex balancing act among conservation, recreation and creating destinations as multiple entities look to solve the corridor’s most pressing problems and establish the waterway as a community center. Taxpayer dollars are flowing to multiple governing bodies — Salt Lake City, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, the Utah Fairpark Area Investment and Restoration District, and more — responsible for parts of the corridor as they look to boost its health in one way or another.

This year, legislators paved a path to take control of development along a troubled stretch of the river near North Temple and funnel state dollars to the most notable project on the waterway’s banks: the Power District. Here, The Larry H. Miller Co. plans to build a glittering west-side downtown.

Power District possibilities

Today, as bikers pedal north along the trail from the Poplar Grove neighborhood, they pass the historic, but damaged, Fisher Mansion before climbing the Archuleta Bridge. The arching span — the last-built link in the path — carries users over east-west train tracks. From there, riders see the towering Gadsby Power Plant.

The pollution-belching plant has long dominated this industrial stretch of the Jordan River in Utah’s capital, but Rocky Mountain Power plans to retire it in 2032. As the power company winds down the machinery, LHM plans to remake the site into a mixed-use community with housing, hotels and, if all goes according to plan, a major league ballpark.

Most river-watchers are cautiously optimistic about the prospect of redevelopment here. The industrial environment south of North Temple and the oft-empty Utah State Fairpark across the street have nurtured what many call an “open-air drug market” in this part of the trail. Residents and advocates hope new construction brings more activity and people to the river’s edge.

Some, however, worry that the reuse of the power plant site will merely push drug activity and more homelessness into surrounding neighborhoods.

“I am very concerned that as they build up that area and push the homeless out, that they’re going to come here and they’re going to go south. That’s a huge concern for me,” Kevin Parke, chair of the Rose Park Community Council, said. “So, I want to make sure that it’s not just, ‘Hey, we’re cleaning up the Power District,’ but ‘Hey, we’re investing in the community and in the neighborhoods and making sure they’re safe.’”

LHM’s early renderings show a slightly wider and more meandering river weaving past restaurant patios, concrete riverside plazas leading down to the water and kayak docks. To the north and south of the proposed stadium, the drawings display softer, greener edges along the waterway with walking paths. The images also depict five small bridges across the river where only two exist now.

“In conjunction with the Jordan River Commission, the plan proposes to elevate the health of the Jordan River by modeling water-use development and improving safety, as well as providing recreation and maintenance solutions,” LHM spokesperson Amanda Covington said in a statement. “This investment will develop this natural asset into a gem all Utahns can be proud of and position Salt Lake as a river city.”

Perhaps nowhere else along the river is the juggling act among commercial use, recreation and conservation as tenuous and, for the moment, murky, as the Power District. Renderings, of course, only capture design goals at one particular moment in time and aren’t guaranteed to come to fruition.

“I’m hopeful that this is all done with a real sensitivity,” said Soren Simonsen, executive director of the Jordan River Commission, “and that the development that we’re envisioning now takes into account what we’ve learned over the last 100 years about what not to do around rivers, and that may be manifest in creating a real green edge.”

Simonsen believes the development can remake the river as a center of community and culture but points to Denver’s Coors Field and San Antonio’s River Walk as cautionary tales — as beloved as they may be — for how development in those cities poured concrete right down to the water’s edge.

“I hope that’s not what we end up seeing here,” he said. “I hope that this really sees a ribbon of green and with landscape and water that is much more reminiscent of landscapes that were cared for and managed by Indigenous people, or the ways that Mother Nature manages, that we have a light footprint and we apply principles of restrained development along the river’s edge, so that the river can become something more natural and more authentic. And those can coexist really well.”

The Point’s possibilities

At the southern edge of Salt Lake County, meanwhile, another mammoth project promises to put those principles into action.

The Point development in Draper, officially on Utah’s books as The Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, will take about 600 acres of publicly owned land where the former Utah State Prison sat and transform it into a mixed-use community complete with offices, housing and entertainment venues. Although the site doesn’t sit along the river, planners are prioritizing a link between the humming development and the waterway’s corridor.

“We’re going to take a tributary and we’re going to bring it in a natural form, have it cross the entire width of the project and have that be the single organizing element. And that’s the River-to-Range Trail and the River-to-Range Park,” said planning director Steve Kellenberg. “Always, we thought, ‘Let’s have a trail,’ but now we’re going to have a more natural, organic representation and extension of the Jordan River. So, the Jordan River, to us, is not just like a nice thing to connect a trail to. It is a fundamental form-giving driver to the framework plan for The Point.”

The River-to-Range Trail and the natural space along it will follow an aboveground stormwater drain that will act as a tributary to the river. The path will link to the Jordan River Trail at its western terminus and meander into Draper’s extensive trail network on the east side of Interstate 15.

Kellenberg said he wants to make it easy — and healthy — to get to and around the future community and create green space at the heart of the development.

Restoring the Emerald Ribbon

As LHM’s planners hone their vision for Salt Lake City’s Power District, another planning effort looks to restore and enhance the 10 miles of the Jordan River in Utah’s capital with the help of a $9 million allocation from the 2022 voter-approved general obligation parks bond.

Officials hope the Emerald Ribbon Action Plan, once it’s finalized this fall, can help City Hall steer funding to the river, its trail and its parks.

The ongoing planning effort faces some of the same challenges that LHM hopes to overcome at the Power District by striking a balance between preserving the corridor’s riparian nature and creating more reasons for people to get down to it.

Makaylah Maponga, the city parks planner leading the project, is most excited about generating new opportunities for people to discover the river in Utah’s capital.

“What gets me in the parks is the farmers markets. It’s the yappy hours and the beer gardens of the world,” she said. “So, I’m really excited to be able to partner with so many different really cool organizations and businesses throughout the city, and say, ‘There’s a lot of really cool spaces on the river. You want to do cool stuff. Let’s just get some events out there.’ And I think that that’s what’s going to bring people who’ve never been to the river before.”

A draft of the Emerald Ribbon Action Plan shows how and where the city could craft flexible spaces for events. At dilapidated Bend in the River in the Glendale neighborhood, designs call for shaded seating, cooking areas and an open lawn. Farther north, the plan aims to repurpose the Fisher Mansion at 200 South for recreation and nature education along the waterway.

On top of all those people-focused places, the draft advocates for more natural spaces in the corridor, too.

One idea is to close the Rose Park Golf Course driving range to make way for a large nature preserve, while another proposal calls for adding wetlands and a formal trail to the river’s bend just north of the Surplus Canal diversion dam and 2100 South.

Parks officials hope the plan spawns new, interesting amenities that welcome visitors to the river, but some west-siders remain skeptical about how the city will maintain new assets, given that it struggles to keep up the ones that already exist.

Kim Raff, who lives in Glendale and walks the trail almost every day, recalled a Glendale Community Council meeting in which city employees came to ask about Bend in the River.

“They were like, ‘So, we have some money for Bend in the River. We just want you guys to have a brainstorming session with us. Like, what can you envision for the Bend in the River?’” Raff said. “We [said we] just want you to cut the grass and pick up the trash and have a normal little park there.”

Mike Christensen, a west-sider and planning commissioner who commutes to work every day along the trail, has similar concerns about the plan.

“I’m very happy that the city is wanting to spend that money and wanting to do the planning process,” he said, “but it is insanely frustrating that the city is talking about the Jordan River’s future when they don’t want to address things going on today.”

Maponga said the plan will establish maintenance guidelines for various parts of the river corridor and look to dedicate more resources to it. For now, no single park maintenance team is responsible for solely the corridor. Existing teams have other responsibilities that drain resources, like caring for Pioneer Park and Library Square.

Salt Lake County, meanwhile, is looking to launch its own major project along the river.

As a part of a planning process called Central Jordan River Reconnect, the county has started to take public feedback on the possible creation of a new regional park running along the river from State Road 201 to 5400 South. That stretch is seven miles long and includes portions of five different cities.

While details are sparse this early in the planning process, the county is trying to extend the Jordan River Trail to both banks to give all the neighborhoods along it access, according to Angelo Calacino, a project manager with the county’s Division of Parks and Recreation.

Tackling homelessness

All those big projects seek to attract more people to the river and turn the trail into a more inviting place. Planners hope a buzz of new activity is enough to chase away crime on the trail.

But the plans on the docket don’t specifically tackle the river’s most pressing issue: unsheltered homelessness.

A statewide group has a radically different notion for how to eliminate homelessness from the river corridor. It calls for closing the trail altogether and reopening it down the line as a state park.

Utah Impact Partnership, a philanthropic group made up of powerful Utahns with last names like Eccles and Ivory, contends the river is misused as a catchall place for unsheltered residents. The group wants illegal camping and rampant drug activity eradicated from the path.

While partnership leaders declined to say how much of the corridor could be shut down, they said they do intend to push for a closure if illegal activity persists on the trail.

Utah Impact Partnership’s other policy priorities fall in line with what river advocates and residents want, including a better-coordinated state homeless services system.

Simonsen, the Jordan River Commission executive director, believes building a stronger, more holistic system would help bring about a Jordan River corridor that everyone feels welcome to use. He and other experts want more affordable housing, manageable temporary shelters and smoother service provision for the roughly 200 people living by the waterway on any given day.

After all, those who sleep along the river still need somewhere to go, and under a state push to open a massive centralized campus for shelter and services, they may not need to go far.

A September memo from the state Office of Homeless Services shows Salt Lake County’s Oxbow Jail is a contender to host the site. The jail, on the river’s edge in South Salt Lake, is on the cusp of closing as county voters weigh a half-billion-dollar bond geared toward homelessness solutions and criminal justice reform.

The long-neglected, oft-ignored Jordan River and its trail still have a long way to go before becoming attractions that provide green space, fresh air and fun cultural events for Utahns, but the movement to shift the stream from a burdensome boundary that separates cities to a true community center that benefits the public is underway — at least in plans.

The problem with plans, of course, is that they aren’t worth much without action.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.