Four-year-old Spence Dalgleish paid no attention Saturday to the colorful renderings of what Sugarhouse Park might look like with facilities for skateboarders, an experimental farm or other additions.
Instead, after a morning of sledding, the bundled-up youngster headed straight for a pile of cookies at what was billed as a vision session held inside the Garden Center.His father, Paul, had a little more interest in helping the Sugarhouse Park Authority board of trustees come up with ideas for the decades-old park's first master plan.
"It's the reason we bought our home basically," Paul Dalgleish said of the family's decision to settle just a few blocks away. "We walk over here quite a bit. We jog, we sled, we bring our dog over."
But he, like many Sugarhouse residents, have improvements in mind for the park. "A little development would be good, maybe an amphitheatre and a skateboard park," he suggested.
Still, Paul Dalgleish said park officials need to be careful not to do so much that they attract too many more people to the urban oasis, tucked between I-80 and the busy intersection of 2100 South and 1300 East.
"How much more traffic can the park handle? Especially on a Sunday afternoon, it's packed to the hilt," he said. By noon Saturday, for example, the sledding hill was crowded with children.
Then there's the lake. Some are suggesting turning it into an ice-skating pond during the winter. Paul Dalgleish just wants it cleaned up. "I know sometimes it smells," he said.
Those are the kinds of comments that Gerry Tully and other board members are anxious to hear. Tully organized an effort to get landscape architecture students at Utah State University to come up with new ideas for the park.
Not that there are any plans to turn the park into a sports complex complete with sand volleyball courts and a concrete skateboard site, or an experimental farm with rows of exotic crops.
But the students were encouraged to look at new uses for the park in the hope that their ideas would stimulate Sugarhouse residents to think about what they want from the facility.
"The reality is, the park is great the way it is," said Tully, himself a landscape architect. "But the only way to keep it the way it is, is to get some policies and documents in place."
Including a master plan, something Sugarhouse Park has never had. Having such a plan would enable some of the more subtle changes -- like cleaning up the lake -- to be incorporated into ongoing maintenance efforts.
Both Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County share the cost of operating the park, and recent budget cuts announced by the county have already hurt an irrigation system replacement project.
The cuts also make it unlikely that there will be any significant changes at the park anytime soon. That's just fine with Diane Waltman, who said she likes the park the way it is.
But Waltman did have a message for park officials: Make it safer, especially for after-dark use. "I jog the park all the time," she said. "I really don't feel very safe over here."