Utah's next new freeway likely will grow and leapfrog across the southwestern Salt Lake Valley incrementally, instead of in the all-at-once pattern that has become the norm on big state projects.
    The proposed Mountain View freeway faces two financial realities that state road builders say will force them to patch together a few miles here and there rather than paving the divided highway all the way from West Valley City to Lehi. One is that the state hasn't dedicated enough money to complete the project. The other is that three development companies that pledged land to the project will take back their gifts if the freeway doesn't cross their properties by 2015. That could drive up the highway's cost by $80 million.
    "It makes sense for us to do those [segments] first so we don't lose out on the donation," project manager Teri Newell said.
    The result likely will be several stretches of freeway stopping and starting between a number of major intersections by 2015, Newell said. But the Utah Department of Transportation will engineer those segments to handle traffic individually until they can be linked to the full 40-mile freeway, she said.
    "Whatever we build, we want to make usable right away," she said.
    The donated land bookends a 10-mile stretch of the freeway in southwestern Salt Lake County, but to date the state has not dedicated nearly enough money
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to complete that stretch. Salt Lake County's portion of Mountain View funding currently amounts to $230 million - a figure that will drop to about $200 million after UDOT completes more land purchases - and the 10 miles in question will cost $650 million to build, Newell told state transportation commissioners last week. So UDOT may have to complete only the parts that cross donated land by 2015.
    "I was just trying to give a reality check that we don't have enough money to build the entire 10 miles,'' Newell said after the meeting.
    Utah highway projects in recent years have turned into massive, all-at-once undertakings, from the Interstate-15 rebuild before the 2002 Winter Olympics to the Legacy Parkway that will open in Davis County this fall.
    At the same meeting, commissioners added $3 million to the environmental permitting process in hopes that UDOT can finish its studies and get approval for construction by the end of the year.