In August, Salt Lake City Public Utilities told a Holladay resident its canals are critical facilities and that it limits access to them. That same department has trail agreements with Murray on the same canal, and with Cottonwood Heights, Sandy and Draper on the East Jordan Canal, which also carries trails in Bluffdale. Its own city built a trail along the canal through Sugar House. Trails on this water are the norm. The fences at Arbor Lane and Fardown Avenue are the anomaly.
Two Salt Lake City canals cross Holladay, the Jordan and Salt Lake Canal and the East Jordan Canal. Neighbors walked their banks for decades. Friends of Holladay's Canal Trails is asking the City to sign the trail agreement Salt Lake City has said it will sign with Holladay, the same kind Murray has, so the walk can open again.
Add your name to the neighbors asking the City to sign a trail agreement. Next you get a ready to send letter to the Mayor and your council member.
Two canals, one owner
Two Salt Lake City canals cross Holladay and run side by side down the valley. Public Utilities runs both. So what makes Holladay so resistant to a public trail?
Jordan and Salt Lake Canal
Dug by hand beginning in 1879.
Salt Lake City800 South to 2100 South
Open since 2016A walking and cycling route along the canal from 9th and 9th to Sugar House. Salt Lake City built it on its own canal.03
MillcreekCrandall Ave to Gunn Ave
PlannedMillcreek's adopted City Center Master Plan calls for a shared use path along the canal from Crandall Avenue to East Gunn Avenue, near 1300 East, as part of the larger canal trail Salt Lake City has planned.15
HolladayArbor Lane
Fenced July 2026The 2025 General Plan calls it a Proposed Pedestrian Priority Trail. Neighbors walked it for decades. The Arbor Lane footbridge came out in 2025 and a new fence went up in July 2026.06
MidvaleI-215 to Princeton Drive
Studied 2023Midvale's 2023 feasibility study covered trails on both canals, the length of the city.07
SandySalt Lake Canal Trail
Open, more plannedSandy's trail on the Jordan and Salt Lake Canal. Sections are open now, and the city plans more.19
East Jordan Canal
The parallel canal.
HolladayFardown Avenue
FencedListed alongside the Jordan and Salt Lake Canal in Table 2 of the 2025 plan. A fence blocks the walk at Fardown Avenue.06
Cottonwood HeightsFort Union to Mountview Park
Open since 2019A 10 foot paved trail over the piped canal, from Fort Union Boulevard at Park Centre Drive to the back of Mountview Park. The city's plans note the canal crosses I-215 in a pipe above the lanes that could double as a pedestrian bridge. In 2023 Public Utilities walked the next stretch with the city to plan an extension north toward Holladay.1016
MidvaleLength of the city
Studied 2023Midvale studied this canal together with the Jordan and Salt Lake.07
BluffdaleDay Ranch Bluff and Independence Bluff
OpenGravel paths along the canal on the bluff above the Jordan River: Day Ranch Bluff, about 1.2 miles, and Independence Bluff, about 2,600 feet.17
Who decides
Holladay asked the whole city, and then asked every home on the canals. The answers are in the City's own study.0511
A majority said yes. About fifty households said no. The fifty have won every year since.
Across the city, supporters outnumbered opponents nearly three to one. The City then hand delivered the same survey to each of the 263 homes that border the canals. Three in four did not send it back. About 50 said they were opposed, fewer than one canal home in five.
No other public project in Holladay runs on that rule. A sidewalk, a park, or a road project does not wait until every adjoining owner agrees. A council hears the people most affected, adds what protections it can, and votes. Murray did exactly that on this same canal in 2017, with 61 opposing comments on the record, and passed it.02
Holladay has never voted on the trail itself. It did vote, unanimously, for a 2025 General Plan that lists both canals as priority trails.13 The finished study went to a work meeting in August 2022, where no motion is taken, and no vote has followed. The study priced construction and left out the legal costs it expected from opposed adjacent owners. The result is a standing veto for a few dozen households over a corridor the General Plan calls a priority. A public trail that needs the unanimous consent of its neighbors has stopped being a democratic decision.1205
The closest match
Neighbors had walked the Murray stretch for years. A resident told the council a gate went up in 2014.02 The City negotiated with Salt Lake City, held an open house, heard every objection Holladay has heard, and voted to go ahead. Holladay has never taken that vote.
The Murray council took up an interlocal agreement with Salt Lake City on April 4, 2017, for a trail along the canal between Fontaine Bleu and Wheeler Farm. As a resident recounted the staff presentation, 123 open house comments favored the trail and 61 opposed it, with the opposition coming from homes that border the canal. The council approved the agreement 3 to 2.02
Three weeks later Salt Lake City's Director of Public Utilities signed it. The agreement, contract C 17-349, is five pages of standard terms. For $1,000, Salt Lake City licensed Murray to build and maintain the trail at Murray's own expense. Murray keeps it open to the public, indemnifies Salt Lake City, and confirms the trail is in Murray's General Plan. Salt Lake City, as owner, keeps the same immunity from suit as Murray, and can revoke the license on 60 days notice.01
A resident told the council he had walked the canal twice a day for 12 years. Ten days after the 2014 gate went in, the first graffiti appeared. When you keep the good people out, he said, the bad people get in.
The council chair walks the trail herself. She said illegal activity tends to happen in closed places where intruders think no one can see them, and much less in places that are looked after.
Speaking for the Murray Rotary Club, a supporter put it plainly. No trail would ever be built if the people closest to it always had the final say.
Council minutes summarize what speakers said. These are paraphrases of the minutes, not verbatim quotes.02
Holladay's own staff told canal neighbors the same thing in 2021, in writing, when residents opposing the study sent the City their questions.
“The information the city has at this point indicates that trash, crime, graffiti, transient use and other negative effects are reduced by trails.”
The same answers point to the Murray canal trail, just across Van Winkle Expressway, as a canal trail “working very well” close to the homes beside it, and note that Public Utilities had known of the City’s interest in trails along its maintenance roads “for more than a decade.”20
The landowner
Salt Lake City Public Utilities calls its canals critical facilities. Its own record shows how it gets to yes, and the law that protects it when it does.
Cottonwood Heights, 2023
In October 2023 Public Utilities staff walked the East Jordan Canal with Cottonwood Heights to plan extending that city's trail toward Holladay. The study that followed sets out the department's conditions under its own heading, “Path to Yes”: construction permits, canal flow, maintenance, trail standards, and an interlocal agreement. It showed the Murray trail as the precedent.10
Utah law
Utah Code 73‑1‑8 protects the owner of a canal from suits arising out of use of a trail along it, where the trail is in a city's general plan and opened under a written agreement. Holladay's General Plan already lists both canals as trails.0806
Murray's agreement is written to those conditions: the trail is in the general plan, open to the public, and the owner keeps its immunity. Holladay would be signing a template that already exists.01
So has Salt Lake City Public Utilities radically changed its policy on canal trails, or is Holladay looking for an excuse?
Sources
Each claim on this page is numbered to a document below. Most are public records. The rest are official city pages.
The ask
Salt Lake City has said it will sign a trail agreement with Holladay City. It signed one with Murray on this same canal for $1,000. The one thing missing is a request from the City.