Midway City is moving forward on plans to connect trails within the town.
Midway City Mayor Celeste Johnson explains that developers in Midway have long had requirements to create trails while building out neighborhoods.
“Because the city has been developed in a rather hopscotch way—which is typical, it's not an unusual thing—we ended up with a whole bunch of small pieces of trails that don't connect to anything,” Johnson explained. “Fast forward 10-15 years we are dealing with repair and infrastructure maintenance on systems that don't go anywhere. So, until these trails are connected, we're paying for something that's kind of silly in a simple word.”
The city is working to connect the trails they currently maintain. They’re doing with help from state grants.
“We have secured through the state approximately $300,000 worth of grant money, that we have to match,” Johnson continued. “We're using that money exclusively to connect these trails so that we end up with loops and trails that go to the State Park. Connected all the way from the East side of Midway all the way up to the State Park.”
The Parks and Trails committee recently completed a survey of residents regarding what they’d like to see from the trails. Johnson reports the survey had nearly 700 participants.
“That number is pretty dramatic,” Johnson said. “I was just at the Utah League of Cities and Towns meeting; Layton did a survey and they were so thrilled to get almost 700 respondents. Layton City, we’re a little town of 5,000 and we had 700 respondents. So, our community is very engaged in this process. We're looking at what they want and that's what we intend to do.”
Right now, most of the trails are hard path trails but Mayor Johnson says the city does have interest in building soft path trails in part for horses but also because Johnson says they are cheaper to maintain.