Dreams abound for ways to renew Salt Lake City’s lush green and popular Liberty Park.

More than a thousand new trees and plants. Acres of added water-wise gardens, groves and meadows. Fresh and revamped trails and pathways to open once-blocked views. Spruced-up takes on Liberty Lake and the park’s koi pond and greenhouse.

Those are part of a new vision plan that also emphasizes renewing safety and accessibility to the beloved east-side park, along with making it more sustainable and drought-resistant over time.

All those dreams, of course, would also carry price tags, in some cases, reaching to the tens of millions. A version of sticker shock already has city officials squeezing their brains for new funding strategies like corporate sponsorships and naming rights.

Guidelines for building out the aspiring 10-year Liberty Park vision are based on an extensive listening campaign with nearly 1,000 members of the public since late 2024.

The vision has been recently unveiled as part of a new guiding cultural landscape report on the nearly 100-acre park, the city’s second largest behind Sugar House Park.

“We heard loud and clear the desire to preserve Liberty Park as the central gathering space of Salt Lake City,” said Kathryn Sonntag, a project manager and landscape architect with the city’s Department of Public Lands, “and the desire to increase its resiliency.”

The capital city’s version of New York City’s long rectangular Central Park is smaller, of course, but welcomes nearly 7,000 visitors on a given weekday and up to 11,000 a day on weekends.

This latest take at City Hall on remaking those green spaces, revered trees, trails and water features bounded by 500 East, 700 East, 900 South and 1300 South is far-ranging, city officials say.

The aim is to both preserve and restore the 147-year-old site as a mainstay of open space serving a population that continues to grow rapidly, while also shooting for keeping the park a vibrant sanctuary for another 100 years.

What a Liberty Park refresh might look like

The new cultural report and vision — similar to ones produced for Pioneer Park — would restore several historic features “while allowing the park to evolve,” Sonntag told the City Council at its Sept. 22 meeting. Plans call for several signature projects intended to elevate the experiences of park users.

Highlights include:

• Enhancing Liberty Lake in the park’s southeast corner to make it more immersive. New features might include a continuous loop trail around lake, a partial boardwalk letting visitors get closer, and wetlands plantings to edge it perimeter.

• Creating walkway connections from the park’s northeast area near Rice Pavilion to the lake with a new trail, an overlook and other amenities wending by the park’s lakeside hill, a sledding favorite created in the 1980s and sometimes referred to as the mound.

“Of course, we would keep that hill,” Sonntag said. “It’s a beloved feature of the park.”

• Turning the park’s greenhouse into a community hub that promotes plant propagation, with new displays, education and community gathering spaces, chances to volunteer, and a kind of showcase of landscape diversity along the Wasatch Front.

• Making the koi pond southeast of the Rotary playground into more of a destination all its own, with cozy seating, picnic shelters and visual links to the park’s central promenade.

• Improving and greening Liberty’s much-used perimeter path by interspersing new trees and buffers and creating a shared roadway out of the park’s encircling Constitution Drive.

• The prospect of cutting annual water usage in the park by up to 14% by introducing more water-wise landscaping on as much of half of its traditional park footprint.

Enacting the plan would also mean boosting year-round staff at the park from six to eight people and seasonal staffing from nine workers to 14.

All told, turning this vision into reality could cost between $36 million and $41 million over the next decade. That has city leaders cautious about overpromising on future results.

“I do feel like this is one of the most loved and used parks in Salt Lake City,” said City Council member Erkia Carlsen, whose District 5 spans the 8-block area. “It’s going to require additional funding and support of various kinds to maintain that.”

Drawing cash from private sources

There’s no exact timeframe as yet for all this work.

What the latest report suggests: projects would be staggered in at least three phases spread over 10 years, with up to $13 million going first for bigger remakes, ongoing maintenance and safety.

That’d be followed by a second $3 million to $4 million phase focused on Liberty Park’s historic integrity and improvements to existing park amenities that visitors use a lot.

A third phase, further out, would fuel long-term and more routine maintenance, including work on features and amenities the public doesn’t use as much. The estimated price on that one, in today’s construction dollars: up to $23.4 million.

Council members finds themselves a little wary at all those figures, coming out of what happened with a $85 million parks bond voters approved in 2022.

That measure’s slow-moving, four-year rollout in bettering parks across Utah’s capital saw lots of delays and no small dose of public frustration, leading some on the council to warn against setting community expectations too high for Liberty Park.

They also want to explore new funding sources this time that don’t tap taxpayers.

“I really will struggle with another plan that we cannot fund, and it will take us 20 years to get there,” said Council Chair Alejandro Puy, “and by the time that we get there, we’re still short on the promises to the community.”

The city’s new vision considers public-private partnerships, Sonntag noted, as well as pulling grants from the county, state and federal government. The revamped greenhouse, in particular, could prove a public-private funding draw as a regional showcase for water-wise landscaping, she said.

Puy has also touted offering corporate naming rights on key features in Liberty Park.

Those arrangements, he said, “allow cities to get huge upgrades and potentially bring amenities in ways that are not impacting our tax dollars, but are enhancing and getting us there.”

Puy also pressed to know why Liberty Park instead of the area between City Hall and the Main Library — referred to by Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s administration as a proposed Civic Center — was now being anointed as the city’s central gathering space.

That view, Sonntag replied, reflected public sentiment that went into the plan and wasn’t an official city designation.