Consultant presents Grantsville transportation master plan, warns 'roads are gonna be failing' without new infrastructure

A consultant for Jones and DeMille Engineering told the Grantsville City Council and Planning Commission on April 14 that the city's draft transportation master plan shows significant congestion under a "do-nothing" scenario and recommends retaining larger rights-of-way and phased new roads to preserve long-term capacity.

"If we do nothing and let the city grow, these roads are gonna be failing," the consultant said during the presentation, describing model runs for 2035, 2042 and 2050 that contrast a failing network if no improvements are made with substantially better traffic flows if proposed roads are built.

The consultant walked elected officials and commissioners through the project website, the roadway classification maps (current versus full build-out), average daily traffic counters and a calibration approach that relies on local tube counts and UDOT regional modeling. He said the team used imagery-based pavement assessments from Violytics to score surface conditions and recommended treatment types—crack seal, chip seal, mill-and-fill or full reconstruction—based on those scores.

The presentation singled out three areas for detailed discussion: wide arterial sections on the west bench, the proposed 33rd Parkway alignment around a rail triangle and the east-side Durfee Street/Highway 112 crossing. For the west bench the consultant said many proposed arterials show 108-foot rights-of-way and asked whether the city wants to preserve that width or adjust the rights-of-way to match lane needs from the model. He warned there is a legal risk if right-of-way requirements exceed what can be justified by the engineering analysis, noting the city attorney would have to advise the council on takings and compensation if excessive right-of-way demands were imposed.

On 33rd Parkway the group debated routing options that would either loop north of the Lakeview Business Park (preserving a continuous grid) or drop south and connect to Night Green to avoid multiple at-grade rail crossings. The consultant emphasized trade-offs between traffic performance, construction cost and the political feasibility of routing through property controlled by private developers.

The consultant also presented a high-level cost estimate for full build-out, saying the total cost to construct all proposed roads (including developer-constructed segments) would be approximately $835,000,000. He said roughly $125,000,000 of that cost would fall to the city, about $145,000,000 to the county, and approximately $450,000,000 to developers, and added that those figures assume wider cross sections (five-lane sections) in some corridors and would decline if lane cross sections are reduced.

Council and commission members raised several data questions, noting different traffic counts for Main Street appeared in various sources (participants referenced counts of about 6,700, roughly 11,000 and an anecdotal 18,000). The consultant acknowledged some model inputs (TMZ files and external counts) can be out of date and said staff would reconcile those values when finalizing the plan.

The consultant announced a public open house in two weeks and said the full report and appendices would be posted online for public review; he described the anticipated adoption path: public open house and comment period, planning commission public hearing and then council adoption. Mayor Heidi Hammond reiterated that tonight was a presentation and discussion only and that no formal action or public comment was taken.

Next steps: the consultant will post the technical report and maps, run the public open house and provide staff and elected officials with the compiled comments for review before the planning commission and council consider formal adoption.