Morgan County develops active transportation plan

Morgan County is planning to adopt a new active transportation plan. The plan, which was prepared by Fehr & Peers, evaluated existing conditions. Then Before formulating recommendations ranging from low-cost near-term strategies to long-term Projects, the consultants interviewed Morgan County residents and other stakeholders to determine their priorities and then came up with suggestions on how it can be implemented along with funding sources and partnership opportunities.

The plan came together with “just this simple desire to make roads, heavily traveled roads within the Morgan County and the Mountain Green area and connecting into Salt Lake and into the Ogden Valley a little safer for runners, for walkers, for bicyclists,” county’s Active Transportation Advisory Board member Ron Niederhauser told county commissioners June 6. 

“We now actually have a true County active Transportation plan which was put together in part with a lot of entities more so than I have envisioned before,” he said.  

The primary recommendations of the plan include development of a Gateway Canal/Weber River Trail along the river in three phases and a possible trail along I-84 between the interstate and the Union Pacific rail alignment from approximately Exit 92 west of Mountain Green to the Morgan County/Summit County boundary northeast of Henefer (although this route poses “significant engineering challenges,” the plan says.

It also recommends adding ‘Share the Road’ and directional signage on Trapper’s Loop Road, a new bike lane for Lost Creek Road up to Lost Creek State Park and another on SR-66 to provide a connection between Morgan City and East Canyon State Park. Proposed connections with Salt Lake County would extend the SR-66 bike lane to East Canyon State Park further south along SR-65 to the Salt Lake County line. A proposed connection to Summit would extend the I-84 Frontage Route out to Henefer. The plan also recommends several spot improvements for various roads including crossing and “multimodal safety” improvements as well as park and ride enhancements at the Dirt Spot location.

Niederhauser and the commissioners acknowledged that the plan, which if approved will become part of the county’s general plan, is essentially a wish list that community members and commissioners hope will be realized over many years. 

“Now that Morgan County has this plan, it may be possible to work with other counties to produce a complete trail system in northern Utah,” Fackrell said.  “We're working with both Weber County and Davis County to devise a plan where the three of us combined together to make that lower end of the county, the Western end of the county to where we have some trails of some sort.” 

With this plan in place, the county can go after state and federal grants to help develop new trails in the county, he said. “We're not going to try to complete this all at once, but this plan gives us an opportunity to when funding is available, we can go for it,” he said.  

“This gives you the ability to go after projects which lack funding now, Christopher Chestnut of UDOT Region 1 said.: “Now we say, ‘Okay Morgan County has a set of priorities they have where they want to go and now we can start going after funding sources.’”

In the past state grants have only been available for trail development but recognizing that maintenance is a huge funding issue for smaller communities, the state is now opening up grant opportunities for funding maintenance, he said.

Commissioners were appreciative of the state’s efforts to help fund maintenance in the smaller communities. “It's one thing to get the trails built but to maintain them is a whole other thing, and to that end I think there are ways we can do it,” Commission Chair Mike Newton said, “but even if it's a trail added to a roadway you're going to increase the cost of redoing that road significantly by adding a bike lane and right now we struggle to do that. Our road funding is just not adequate.”

Though the plan might indicate trails through private property in certain places, those trails would only be developed if the landowner were willing, the commissioners said, for example, a new developer might be willing to put in a trail segment if he/she were granted higher density concessions.

The commission then instructed that the plan go to the Morgan County Planning Commission for review. On June 22, the planning commission began discussing the plan. After that body makes a recommendation, it will be returned to the county commission, probably in July, for further refinement and a vote. λ