This sprawling Utah city is exploding with new people — and still has room to grow. Do locals want it to?

When Trent Siggard moved to Eagle Mountain a few years ago, he decided to ride his bike down every street.

“I want to know its nooks and crannies,” he thought. “I want to know where things are.”

It took about five months to pedal through the city’s 52 square miles — into developments (some established, some still under construction) and alongside cars on the paved Pony Express Trail, all the way out to the lonely corners of the community that are not yet filled with people, but instead fields of scraggly sagebrush and juniper.

He found a city with great potential, he said, but still in flux, more of a bedroom community than a live-work-play destination.

Since it was founded in 1996, Eagle Mountain has grown from a few hundred people to more than 73,000. That aligns with Utah County’s general trajectory — massive, quick population growth, fueled mostly by Utah outsiders moving in. But Eagle Mountain is different.

With only about 30% of its surface area filled, there’s room to grow, for one. The city’s economic development director, Evan Berrett, said officials want to seize the opportunity.

But its long had an outdoorsy, adventurist ethos that can conflict with those ambitions. Locals like their dark skies, Berrett said, and enjoy watching the mule deer migrate each year. They want to keep riding their bikes and ATVs around town.

It’s why Todd Black, the city’s open space manager, said officials like to divide plans for the future into thirds: one part commercial, one part residential and one part open space.

“It’s going to be a catching-up game for a long time,” Berrett said.

On a Thursday afternoon in April, as kids rode scooters through the city’s flagship park and cycled on its meandering neighborhood trails, Siggard gave The Salt Lake Tribune a bike tour — and came across one of his biggest peeves.

The paved path he was on near a neighborhood pocket park abruptly ended, trailing off into patches of grass and loose rock. About three feet over to the right, a new path started, leaving an awkward gap. And to his left, yet another paved trail ran parallel.

“Was it the city that did this? Was it the developers?... Who didn’t get the memo?,” he asked incredulously.

Eagle Mountain City Council recently started looking for a firm to help “connect a good chunk” of the city’s trails, spokesperson Tyler Maffit said. “All is not, I think, a reasonable aim at this time,” he added, but that’s the eventual goal, “so that we have a really comprehensive trail network.”

In the grand scheme of things, the odd obstacles are more a perplexity than a problem, but they’re an example of the city’s plans — and its growing pangs.

The city also recently approved a downtown plan, a project years in the making meant to move City Hall north to establish an urban core and better connect its sprawl.

“As we continue to grow, we can’t have chaos,” Black said. “We’ve got to have some methods to our madness, and no better time than the present to start working on that.”

Staying local

The Eagle Mountain of today didn’t expand from an established downtown. Its growth instead has been disjointed, mostly sprinkled around its current City Hall or to the north, where neighborhoods stretch toward nearby Saratoga Springs.

Berrett said the city is fortunate to have others to look to as guides. By 2060, he said, Eagle Mountain anticipates to house 175,000 people.

“How can we do this in a way that all the other cities kind of wish they could do, if a city could look back 50 years and change all the things they had done, to change outcomes and whatnot?,” he said. “We get to learn from all the other cities in Utah County, Salt Lake County — all across Utah and the nation, and apply that.”

A key step now is building up places where people can both live and work.

Over 1,000 businesses are currently licensed in Eagle Mountain, but you wouldn’t know it, Berrett said. Most are run out of homes, since there aren’t many studios, office spaces or other locations where they can operate.

Many of those businesses start “very optimistic,” he said, but “oftentimes find themselves in Lehi or Spanish Fork, or Salt Lake [City], or wherever else, because there just isn’t opportunity to do that here.”

The downtown project, he said, should provide a new landing spot. The plan calls for small business space, and spots where locals can shop or dine in town, instead of leaving to take their tax dollars elsewhere.

“It’s felt like a long time coming that we wanted to have something like that,” Berrett said.

‘A proper balance’

When Jacob Klausmeier and his wife first looked to move from Cedar City a few years after graduating from Southern Utah University, they initially wanted to be in Salt Lake County, closer to family.

Together, they searched for a two-bedroom home to rent by owner, because they didn’t want to go through a property management company, but prices were too high.

They found options in both Davis and Utah counties, but ultimately decided on Eagle Mountain. It’s not perfect but it has potential, Klausmeier said, especially if the city moves away from building for cars instead of people.

“Here in the South Valley, and in northern Utah Valley, it’s so car-centric that I didn’t see a coffee place that wasn’t either a drive-thru place or a trailer,” he said.

Food options, too, seem more catered to grabbing a “quick bite,” he said, instead of welcoming people to stay for an hour or two.

Yet while still expensive — like much of Utah’s housing market — Eagle Mountain also has a reputation for more affordable homes, since so many are being built, he said.

Berrett said there’s not a specific reason, such as a municipal code, for why Eagle Mountain would have fewer property management companies running rentals. He did note that while the city has a “decent share of rentals,” there aren’t any traditional apartment complexes within city limits.

He also said the city was an early adopter of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, which can open up rentals on existing parcels, while some cities have eschewed or strengthened those regulations.

Anything more dense, though, and locals’ opinions are mixed, Berrett said.

“Most people, it’s not something they’re super in favor of,” Berrett said. “But I think we’ve come a long way in the city, understanding that there is a proper balance.”

To help offset fears that density will mean more people — and more cars — compounding already congested commutes, he said he hopes to one day offer more “transportation assets,” like bus options.

The Utah Transit Authority mentioned providing all-day bus and on-demand service to Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs in its five-year Utah County plan, along with other needs for the area.

“Our region is growing rapidly,” the report noted, and that growth informs the agency’s decision-making.

“UTA plans to initiate a robust dialogue with the community to ensure we are putting the right service in the right place,” the report added.

Open space and opportunity

Klausmeier said Eagle Mountain’s easy access to the outdoors isn’t what drew him and his wife to the city.

“But it is something that you think about once you get out there,” he said.

The city once had longterm plans for its separate parks, trails and open spaces, Black said, but it prioritized parks. Those wilder spaces soon welcomed invasive weeds (tumbleweeds in particular), soil erosion and unsightliness, like litter.

They want to course-correct. That’s why an environmental planning intern developed a plan for the city’s more than 1,000 acres of open land, like fencing and revegetating critical wildlife migration corridors.

Siggard has since left Eagle Mountain, instead living in the hazy divide between fast-growing Saratoga Springs and Lehi. But he still has a keen interest in its future.

“There is still the opportunity to make this community even better,” he said, like better pedestrian infrastructure to make the community more walkable and more safe.

At the end of the bike tour, as Siggard drove back to Cory Wride Memorial Park, he passed through the city’s current urban core — one shopping center a busy street over from City Hall.

He noticed two people approaching a crosswalk, fixed with flashing lights to warn cars — but no traffic signal to stop them — as he drove by. The pedestrians needed to make it over four lanes, plus a median, to get to the other side.

“Oh, they’re going to try to cross the street. So sad,” he said. “No one stops.”

Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.