Herriman's open space promise has no number behind it

The city's best case first.

Herriman counts 2,666 acres of public open space, 2,396 of them in the Herriman Hills foothills above the city 1. Since the 2020 plan it has added 249 acres there, opened the Wide Hollow Trailhead with about 70 parking spaces and a 234-step staircase to the Shoreline Trail 12, and opened Monument Park, 7.47 acres built with the Olympia development 3. In July the City Council denied, 4-1, a request to vacate a public trail near Rose Creek Estates and ordered mitigation improvements instead 4. A city indifferent to open space does not vote that way.

Now the arithmetic that complicates it.

The draft Parks, Open Space, Recreation, and Trails Master Plan 2026 puts Herriman at 303.1 park acres and a level of service of 4.5 park acres per 1,000 residents, against a 2025 population of 67,970 1. Its recommended standard for 2050 — a year the same document projects at 116,653 residents — is 3.7 acres per 1,000 1. The goal, in a city twice this size, is to give each resident less park than they have now. Even at that lowered bar it needs 431.6 acres, has 303.1, has 81.4 coming, and stays 47.1 short of its own reduced target 1.

The money runs the same way. The plan prices its recommendations through 2050 at $139,684,200 1. Impact fees will not carry it: at current rates the city expects about $6.6 million in park impact fees over ten years, not the $22.4 million the growth would otherwise justify, since much of it sits inside public infrastructure districts where fees are not charged 1. The plan projects an operating gap of $718,000 to $1.3 million a year by 2032 if parks are held to 23 percent of tax revenue 1.

On open space itself, the plan sets no number at all. It says communities acquire open space "opportunistically" and that Herriman should acquire more "as opportunities arise" while considering "earmarking additional funding resources" 1. That is a recommendation to keep doing what the city already does, with no acreage and no line item. Park land has a floor. Open space has a hope.

Meanwhile the acreage has moved the other way. On April 23, 2025 the City Council changed a parcel designated parks and plaza space to Residential 2 and approved 136 single-family homes on land nearby residents understood would become a park, as part of the assembly for the Southwest Athletic Complex site 6. The city's own site says it plainly: Creek Ridge, planned as a regional park, becomes 136 homes 5. The complex is not funded, and because it will run pay-to-play the city excludes its 56.9 acres from the level-of-service count 15. The city says Jackson Park is unaffected and expected within three to five years 5. But the acreage came off the books in 2025, and the substitute is 2030 at the earliest, possibly never.

The general plan's own instruction has not been carried out either. Herriman NEXT, adopted in 2022, carries an action item to "establish a Conservation Design Ordinance and Zoning Category or Overlay" so subdivisions can cluster homes and preserve the balance of the land 7. On Aug. 19 the Planning Commission recommended approval of a 68-lot conventional subdivision, Laguna Pointe, with no negotiated open space, after the planning director said that general plan open space designations apply to property already under public control or secured through negotiation, and that placing one on private land would risk constituting a regulatory taking 8. That is a defensible statement of the law. It is also an acknowledgment that the plan's open space map means nothing until an ordinance makes it mean something.

Here is our judgement.

The Herriman City Council should not adopt the 2026 parks plan as drafted. Adopt it with three changes. Hold the park standard at today's 4.5 acres per 1,000 through 2050 — 524 acres at the plan's own population figure, 221 more than exist — instead of letting it fall as the city grows 1. Set an open space acreage floor tied to population, the way the parks chapter sets one for parks. And pass the conservation design ordinance promised since 2022, with a map that says where it applies. None of that requires new money this year. It requires deciding, before the next land trade, what the city will not trade away.

What would change our mind: the Oct. 14 staff report asked only for review, no adoption action, and the draft's adoption dates are still blank 19. If the plan returns with a funded open space line, a real acreage target and an adopted overlay, most of this argument goes away, and we will say so in print.

We are not arguing that Herriman has stopped protecting open space. It is still buying foothills, still building trailheads, still refusing to give up a trail. We are arguing that the city's written commitment now runs ahead of its own numbers, and that a plan whose open space chapter contains no target, no fund and no ordinance is a statement of values rather than a policy. Values, unlike acreage, cost a council nothing to hold.