Ephraim council approves master plan
for Canyon View Park improvement
By Lloyd Call
Associate Publisher
9-24-2020
EPHRAIM—Following results from a community survey last November, the Ephraim recreation board recommended a master plan for the Canyon View Park, and the council approved it at their meeting last Wednesday.
In a presentation to the council, Michael Patton, recreation director, said the plan is a “living document” and is not meant to be implemented all at once, but to give direction to improvements over 10 to 20 years.
Priorities are shade structures, additional trees, benches, skate park, restroom, drinking fountains, basketball court, improvements to amphitheater and additional parking.
Councilman Greg Boothe commented, “I’ve had a lot of calls from people who would love to have a nice skate park.” The two charts show budgeted costs of priorities, with low and high-end cost figures, and a map that gives approximate location of improvements.
While looking at the master plan, the council discussed parking around the adjacent fire station. “During a recent concert, some people actually parked in front of the fire station bays, and that created problems when the fire department was called out in the middle of last weekend’s concert in the nearby park,” public safety director Aaron Broomhead said. “We need to make sure the fire station area is protected by any future expansion of the park, protecting egress to the fire station.”
Mayor John Scott said that in regards to the CARES grant money that is available to Ephraim, “Small rural cities like ours face challenges with how or even if we can use CARES money, because of the trail of red tape required. You have to show the money will be used for COVID-19 issues. For example, we know the Ephraim Ambulance service has been hard pressed to handle all the COVID transports. Can we get money to help our EMS services? We are getting advice from the county and other sources to choose what we could use the money for.”
“If we get money and can’t show we used it for COVID related expenses, we would be forced to pay it back, and that has us kind of shy about using money unless we can justify how we use it,” Scott also said.
Bryan Kimball, community development director, said the ongoing major water project is almost complete. Final phases of the project include replacing ancient clay sewer lines with more safe and substantial piping. “We are having some overruns because when we go down the required depth to bore beneath streets, we have encountered boulders that are much larger than we planned for, so we have to get larger piping to go through those,” he said.
Councilwoman Margie Anderson reported that the cemetery board would like to see some improvements made at the old Pioneer Cemetery north of town. “They want a nice flagpole, and some additional access roads to the cemetery,” she said. The council thought the city might have a spare pole that could be used as a flagpole, and will look into it.
Shaun Kjar, city manager, reported on both the recent Airport Fly-in and the Drug Addiction Awareness Concerts. “We have over 800 people who signed in at the fly-in, our best showing for several years. Also, the concert brought out around 500 people. We had only planned on about 150 people, but the city resources were able to handle both events, while maintaining safety COVID protocols.
COVID protocols under the “yellow” category say indoor gatherings cannot exceed 3,000 indoors, or 6,000 outdoors, so both events were well under those ceilings.
