Police helped to diffuse a showdown Monday between residents along Salt Lake City’s Parkway Avenue and crews from South Salt Lake who had come that morning to chop down trees on land near their backyards.

The early-morning encounter near 1300 East followed months of tension between about 35 homeowners in Highland Park and the suburban city neighboring Utah’s capital.

Residents are worried over South Salt Lake’s plans to build a fence around the lots behind their homes that were once a piece of Sugar House Park and are now city-owned. Many homeowners use the space for gardens.

“Our homes are directly adjacent to this property,” said resident Keith Carrick, who helped organize Monday’s small gathering. “We can’t be expected to stay silent while work continues amid unresolved legal questions and serious safety concerns that we’ve been raising for months.”

South Salt Lake, meanwhile, said it needs to protect the property as an important piece of city infrastructure and that residents were impeding access.

“I completely 100% empathize” with the neighbors, city spokesperson Joseph Dane said after the morning incident.

“If I bought a house and there was a lovely empty lot next door that I got to use for decades and I thought it was part of my house,” Dane said, “then all of a sudden, a private landowner came to develop it, it would be a huge loss.”

“That,” he added, “is the impasse we’re at.”

Anticipating the arrival of city crews, about 20 Parkway Avenue residents gathered a little after sunrise Monday on lawn chairs and arranged themselves along the sidewalk in front of an access road leading to the vacant lot immediately south of Interstate 80. They were equipped with paperwork, bottles of water and boxes of doughnuts.

A little after 8 a.m., orange-vested public works crews from South Salt Lake arrived in a handful of vehicles, including a front-loader, dump truck and pickups full of equipment, wanting to head onto the property for a then-unspecified list of tasks.

Residents weren’t having it. Then, someone called the cops.

Two Salt Lake City officers arrived and acted as intermediaries, relaying information between the two groups.

The muted confrontation unwound after about 90 minutes.

That’s when a South Salt Lake crew foreman, one of the police officers and two residents walked a portion the 8-acre open space, with the foreman assuring everyone that the day’s work was only aimed at removing trees encroaching on the access road through the site — and not razing their gardens.

At least not that day, neighbors were told.

Having captured the assurances on video, the residents’ tensions eased, and as they dispersed, they handed out leftover doughnuts to the workers.

“Our fight,” said Carrick, “is not with those guys.”

Dane said South Salt Lake was seeking to hire a contractor to build the fence and had other on-site improvements to do before it was likely to act on notices of impending removal of property and fixtures that have spilled onto the land.

The city spokesperson also said South Salt Lake intended to fully comply with Salt Lake City’s process for obtaining a permit to build the fence.

Tensions brewing since April

Though the neighborhood and the slim triangular-shaped property all fall within Salt Lake City limits, South Salt Lake has owned the parcels since 1980.

Neighbors have worried since April over the city’s stated intentions to build a barrier that would cut them off from the area — and the possibility that public works crews might come to rip out a green fringe of generations-old gardens and fruit trees setting on the vacant lot.

The residents say they have enjoyed access to the space for decades. Along with losing their gardens, they worry about heightened wildfire risk if they are blocked from periodically mowing the area’s tall dry grass.

South Salt Lake is vowing to step up its maintenance to lessen fire risks on the property once the fence goes up.

Residents’ inquiries and requests for more information from the suburb since April have gone all but unanswered for months, they say.

On its website, South Salt Lake said it is also responding to residents’ concerns about vagrancy on the site, along with protecting city facilities. The fence it proposes to build around the land, it says, is meant “to prevent trespassing and unauthorized use of the land.”

Parkway Avenue residents had been given a July 1 deadline to pull their belongings off the property behind their yards, with warnings that after that date, it could all be hauled away without further notice.

In the case of at least one 73-year-old Parkway Avenue resident, Barbara Leary, that includes a stand of fruit trees planted nearly 50 years ago.