Foothills utility project adds a new chapter to Salt Lake City's trail wars. 

• Benjamin Wood
• An access route at Edgehill Road in The Avenues, where Rocky Mountain Power is working to mitigate fire risks.

Salt Lakers who walk or bike along the Foothills trail system might have noticed a few changes recently. Last month, Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) began phase three of its fire mitigation project.

This project seeks to replace aging, wooden transmission poles with new metallic ones to lower the risk of wildfires. But to get to the transmission poles, RMP dug anywhere from 10- to 20-foot-wide access roads along existing platforms or trails in the Foothills.

"It's no secret that there have been utility-caused wildfires across the U.S.," said RMP spokesperson Jona Whitesides. "So [we're] really trying to find that balance between making those changes, but then also trying to minimize the impact in the areas that we're doing."

However, the digging for RMP's access roads has been a cause of concern for some Salt Lakers. 

"I can't [use the trails] because all I see is the destruction," said Hilary Jacobs, a founding member of Save Our Foothills. 

Save Our Foothills is a conservation organization that has advocated for responsible trail planning since its founding in 2021. When Jacobs saw the new access roads, she was upset that the city had allowed this to happen. 

Meanwhile, city officials said that environmental impact has always been considered in the planning of this project. The Public Utilities department owns a large portion of Foothills land for infrastructure like water tanks and department officials say they've worked with RMP to identify routes and access points.

"[We're] trying to minimize [the impact to] where they're going to go by allowing them to go on some of the areas that were already disturbed," said Jesse Stewart, deputy director of Public Utilities.  

In some cases, RMP can use one road to get to several transmission poles, Stewart said. However, other cases require the creation of a new access road to ensure crew workers have a safe way to get to the poles. This might be the case if there's an obstruction in the planned pathway, too steep a grade, or if revegetating a certain area would be more difficult than creating a new road. 

"It might look like a little more impact because they're not going pole to pole," he said. "But it actually alleviates some of the risk of going pole to pole, and then might help with some of the ultimate restoration." 

However, people like Jacobs and geologist Dan Schelling, who is also a founding member of Save Our Foothills, worry that the area's arid climate and rocky soil might make restoration difficult. They both want to make sure revegetation in the area is managed well and to a high standard. 

"Think in terms of rewilding, getting native plants back and ensuring that you've set it up so that the animals can return and the birds can return, that's sort of what we want at this point," Schelling stressed. 

Tyler Fonarow, recreational trails manager for the Department of Public Lands, said that restoration will take several years and that the city will help supervise it. RMP will contract with Kay-Linn Enterprises, an outdoor recreation advising company that participated in previous work for the Foothills, to oversee restoration. 

But restoration isn't the only problem some have raised with this project. An alleged lack of transparency has been a concern as well. 

For example, one group of residents from Edgehill Road in the Upper Avenues claimed they were never made aware that an access road was going to be dug from the end of Edgehill until after it had already been cut. Concerns from these residents were addressed during a meeting between them and city officials at the site of the road.

But Jacobs and Schelling said they feel blindsided by the project, too, for different reasons. Their Save Our Foothills group organized opposition to a planned expansion of the city's Foothills trail network, causing those plans to be shelved, and Jacobs reported the group has had a good working relationship with the city ever since that effort.

"Then it seems that actually they've been kind of talking out of both sides of the mouth because we've learned things that they didn't reveal that they were working on that were sort of in violation of not only what the pause was with the city for building trails, but also a violation of trust," Jacobs said. 

The Foothills were home to an extensive number of informal trails before the city started formalizing some and constructing new ones in 2020. Save Our Foothills accused the city of failing to catalog existing trails and failing to communicate with Native American leaders over how to develop the land responsibly.

"That's why we, as Save Our Foothills, are in shock," Schelling said. "We thought we had an agreement that we would look at these things carefully and come up with the best way of dealing with them." 

Some trail proponents, however, question the motives of those opposed to expansion, as adjacent landowners have objected to the increased public visitation by trail users that would follow improvement. In addition to preventing the development of public trails, avenues residents have also objected to public transit and new housing construction in the affluent neighborhood.

For the city, the access roads created by the RMP project have offered an opportunity to restart executing plans for the Foothills trail system. This is after several advising groups, including Kay-Linn Enterprises, studied the previous plan and made new recommendations. 

These recommendations included creating a stakeholder group, a new Foothill Open Space Zone to facilitate city management of the trails, better signage and a formal trail system rather than a cluster of informal, unmanaged trails. 

"We can say we're actively integrating this user trail or social trail, too, because we feel like it's an asset to our system," Fonarow notes. "Or, we passively let it go because it's not inhibiting much, or if it's degrading the environment poorly, then we will act on it by restoring it to its natural state as much as we can." 

Fonarow said the collaboration between Kay-Linn Enterprises and the city will help make this a reality as both can work together to formalize some trails while rehabilitating the landscape. However, the city has not released funds to Public Lands to actually build or formalize any trails yet. The project's plans are still being finalized and a stakeholder group is being formed. 

RMP's current activity in the Foothills is part of the third phase of its fire mitigation project. The fourth phase is scheduled to commence in 2025 and cover the area from North Bench to the Capitol.