Plans for the alternate Highway 189 route are still in the early stages but moving along under the Utah Department of Transportation.
With traffic on US Highway 189 having increased in recent years, the Utah Department of Transportation is looking at ways to ease the strain on Heber Main Street.
“We’re a little over a year into this process, and there’s probably a few more years of work to be done,” said Dustin Grabau, Wasatch County interim manager.
Last summer, UDOT held information meetings and gathered public comment. It began a state-funded $3 million environmental impact study last spring.
The study is part of the process to come up with alternatives to Heber Main Street for Highway 189. UDOT spokesperson Geoff DuPais said it also considers community needs for the project to weigh.
Another UDOT representative gave an update at a county council meeting Wednesday night.
According to Grabau, there are about 15 options on the table that UDOT is considering.
“I think we’re probably several months, if not years, away from a final alignment,” Grabau said. “I expect UDOT will quickly get us options that they’re exploring out of those 15. I imagine they’ll nail it down to a smaller number, and then they will again solicit feedback from the public about the pros and cons of each of those options. I would expect that probably sometime next year.”
As of now, Grabau said Wasatch County has only spent money to preserve land officials think could be used for a corridor road.
“I think it will end up being, I expect, a number of years before we end up getting UDOT to fund the construction portion of it,” Grabau said.
Local county and city officials have said they hoped that could be between five and 10 years out.
