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Salt Lake City Emerald Ribbon Action Plan



Client: Salt Lake City, Utah Department of Public Lands
Date: 2023-2025
Role: Project Manager, Senior Urban Planner
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah

In 2023, I joined Agency Landscape + Planning, a mission-driven practice that specializes in open space planning. That summer, I became the Project Manager for the Emerald Ribbon Action Plan. An Action Plan is similar to a Master Plan, but with a greater focus on tactical implementation; in this case, our work was to facilitate a community-led planning process to prioritize $12.5 million in existing funding to improve the beloved but struggling 16 km Jordan River Corridor in Salt Lake City.

Community Engagement


We were lucky to work with clients at the Public Lands Departmenet that were as invested in meaningful community engagement as we were. We conducted a wide-reaching discovery process, conducting stakeholder workshops, multi-lingual community focus groups, open houses, youth workshops, pop-ups, and digital surveys.

We found that across all walks of life, restoring and enhancing the river corridor as a natural refuge was the community’s priority. Additional programming and park investments, therefore, should be concentrated at “activity hubs” that maximized programming investments while minimizing human impact on the natural environment. Through concept development and testing, we created a corridor-wide vision and designed concepts for  transformational projects at five sites.

From August 2023 through July 2024, we held eight public events in addition to smaller workshops with dedicated Technical Advisory and Community Advisory Groups. Throughout the project, over 8,000 residents were engaged either digitally or in person.

In the future, the community dreams of...




Lack of safety and cleanliness were the most common themes people mentioned when describing their perceptions of the corridor, reflecting years of complicated economic and social upheaval in the area. 

Safety considerations are multifaceted: residents expressed feeling unsafe at night due to poor lighting along the trail, during the day due to the large presence of unsheltered populations in the corridor, and within the river due to steep banks and poor water quality. Perceptions about cleanliness centered on the presence of refuse in the waterway and adjacent parks and under-maintained amenities. Feeling that it is not well cared for by the city, some residents and stakeholders have mentioned taking it upon themselves to clean certain sections of the river.


This diagram illustrates the complex overlaps in maintenance jurisdictions; confusion about who owns what duplicates effort and slows down progress today.

Developing the Vision


We worked closely with a 20-person Community Advisory Group to develop Guiding Principles that reflected the community’s priorities and held us accountable to what mattered most to Westside residents. 

These became the chapters for the final recommendations.


The Action Plan


The final plan is currently being reviewed for approval by the Salt Lake City City Council. Learn more at www.emeraldribbonplan.com.



This work was completed while I was a Senior Urban Planner at Agency Landscape + Planning. Credit goes to Principals Gina Ford, Rhiannon Sinclair and landscape designers Kym Ware and Yiyang Li, as well as the teams at Siglo Group and Omnes.

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