Wasatch County dignitaries celebrated the near completion of the Jordanelle Parkway project on Tuesday. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held but the road remains closed.
The four mile long road, known as the Jordanelle Parkway, will connect Summit and Wasatch Counties, on State Roads 248 and US 40.
Heather Kruse is the project manager for the Military Installation Development Authority, known as MIDA. MIDA will use taxes collected from within the project area to pay for the road. She said even though the road isn’t open to the public yet, officials wanted to do the ribbon cutting now.
“So we wanted to really take a moment to thank everybody that's been involved, from the contractors, to the planning committees, to the county to the state legislature to MIDA and really just give them a chance to take pause and take a look at what they've accomplished,” Kruse said. “So we just really wanted to take a minute to celebrate before the weather got bad.”
There are some 20,000 residential units approved, but not yet built, in the Jordanelle Basin.
Kruse said when the parkway does open later this year, it will offer accessibility to many of those units.
“So it's a connector piece,” she said. “It also provides an access point even for, like the fire department, it will make it a lot quicker for them to get from the district over here on the west side of the Jordanelle over to the east side. So it's gonna be a great thoroughfare.”
The road was expected to be completed in the summer of 2019, but it was delayed due to terrain issues.
While the road is fully paved now, it’s still closed to the public. Kruse said they’re just waiting on a few loose ends before they open it.
“So with the materials that we need to finish the lighting, the signage, guardrails, some of that is coming from the west coast,” she said. “Unfortunately, with all of the wildfires that are happening right now — also with COVID — it's kind of a compound affect….it’s delayed delivery of some of those things.”
She said the road will definitely be open by the end of the year, but hopefully it will be finished by the end of November.
